The Eye of Providence, also known as the all-seeing eye of God, represents how God watches over humanity, and is a symbol that is typically considered a sign of God's love and care; however, it also has a much more sinister connotation due to its relation to surveillance. The Eye of Providence is shown hovering over an unfinished pyramid on the American dollar bill, and while many conspirators believe the Eye is used to show the United States watching over and protecting its citizens, it also closely relates to the topic of how The United States uses surveillance to pry into the lives of Americans. Although the Eye of Providence is not outright shown or used in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Eye identifies with how the book’s omnipresent
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The technological scrutiny that Americans are subjected to everyday has begun to infringe upon the privacy that many people value in ways that do not relate to terrorism, and in an essay titled Personal Information and Surveillance, the author states that “We are increasingly likely to be betrayed by our own appliances,” (Personal Information and Surveillance). The author writes about how Americans are constantly monitored by technology, from a person’s location to the phone calls he or she makes. Almost any network or system holds the ability to scan someone’s technology and find anything that could be remotely incriminating, from the offensive language a company’s employee may use in an email to the classified information he or she may leak. The author writes that this idea that the technology a person uses daily holds the power to expose his or her offenses to the world relates strongly to how the telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can reveal a person’s feelings or rebellious thoughts about the Party, however correct or incorrect they may be (Personal Information and Surveillance). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell writes “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plate commanded, he could be seen as well as heard,” (Orwell, 9). This description of the extent to which technology invades the private lives of the Oceanians shows how similar and invasive modern-day technology has
The technological scrutiny that Americans are subjected to everyday has begun to infringe upon the privacy that many people value in ways that do not relate to terrorism, and in an essay titled Personal Information and Surveillance, the author states that “We are increasingly likely to be betrayed by our own appliances,” (Personal Information and Surveillance). The author writes about how Americans are constantly monitored by technology, from a person’s location to the phone calls he or she makes. Almost any network or system holds the ability to scan someone’s technology and find anything that could be remotely incriminating, from the offensive language a company’s employee may use in an email to the classified information he or she may leak. The author writes that this idea that the technology a person uses daily holds the power to expose his or her offenses to the world relates strongly to how the telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can reveal a person’s feelings or rebellious thoughts about the Party, however correct or incorrect they may be (Personal Information and Surveillance). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell writes “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plate commanded, he could be seen as well as heard,” (Orwell, 9). This description of the extent to which technology invades the private lives of the Oceanians shows how similar and invasive modern-day technology has