coolbeans, 4/19

The fact that we discussed George Orwell’s novel 1984 in class on Thursday was significant because the novel is about a society that is always watched by “Big Brother’s” thought police. It was interesting that people said that Orwell was inaccurate in his predictions about the future because it just shows how commonplace all of the things that are here to “watch” us have become. The novel seems extreme because people in the novel are not even allowed to have other thoughts. While we still have the freedom to think our own thoughts, people are still ostracized and branded as “crazy, weird, freakish, etc…” if they choose to believe in things that go against what has become normalized, or politically correct. People’s thoughts are monitored through what they choose to say on facebook, blogs, websites, etc… and how they portray themselves to others. Another interesting thing that we talked about in class this week was the concept of the Panopticon. The panopticon is a architectural plan for a type of prison in which prisoners are in their individual cells arranged in a circular manner and a tower in the center has guards in it who randomly pull out their guns on the prisoners at random hours of the day. This leads the prisoners to believe that the guards are always there and that they are always being watched, which makes them more likely to keep their behavior in check. Many establishments here work in the same manner as the panopticon, but not as violently with guns. For example, people choose to obey a traffic that is red if there is a camera there because we do not want to face the consequence of paying the fee of a ticket. Despite the fact that we have absolutely no idea if the camera is a real camera or a fake one or if it is on at all hours of the day we are aware of its presence and therefore we choose to obey the law.