Monday, February 21, 2005

George Orwell and Blogging

The fact that a loser like me can just set up a blog and actually have people read it, got me to revisit a recurrent thought I've had--that George Orwell in 1984 got it half right and half wrong. Orwell's "negative utopia" had ubiquitous "telescreens", something he conceived of as a television set that could both receive and transmit; it could both feed you the government's line, and spy on how closely you were following it. With computers, laptops, web cameras, and everywhere internet access, we're basically there. What Eric Blair (Orwell's real name) couldn't quite see was that all this recieving and transmitting could go in many directions. Being a good socialist, he only saw the central planning model, where "the word" goes out from one location to all, and the return path is from all back to the central location. He didn't (apparently) envision telescreens that were peer-to-peer, to use the term loosely, where any one can see and talk to and write to any other one (or many other ones), where in fact this giant network of two-way telescreens that we call the internet lets us choose from a multiplicity of voices, not be forced to hear just one.
Yeah, ok, the markets need to open back up so I don't get too philosophical . . . .

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I like your post. I've had similar thoughts. Reminds me also of Ray Bradbury's parlor walls in Farenheight 451.