Privacy is Publicity
Imagine being constantly watched. Everything you do, from the words you speak and places you go, to the thoughts you think, are constantly being documented, inspected, and analyzed. This was daily life for the characters in the dystopian society of Oceania. The level of surveillance portrayed in George Orwell’s novel 1984, is not as extreme and far off from our daily lives in 2018 as the reader may think. Surveillance levels in the world today are on the fast track to those in 1984.
In today’s modern society, privacy is seen as a basic right. However, the chances of being in a completely private space are getting smaller and smaller, reaching a point where complete privacy is hard to come by. No, you can’t just head over …show more content…
Shift your gaze up about four inches. Have you ever thought much about that little dot centered above your computer screen? Without even realizing it, people in today’s society are continuously surrounded by cameras. Embedded into some webcams, there is a software called a Remote Access Tool or an RAT. This software “allow[s] a third party to spy on a computer user from afar.” This includes rummaging through messages, observing browsing activities, photographing the computer screen, or even hijacking the webcam and taking photographs of the person on the other side of the screen. “RATs are widely used in a variety of contexts, some benign, others not. Across the board, abuse tends to be the rule.” (Massoglia) Maybe today’s society isn’t as different from Oceania as we are lead to …show more content…
It’s part of being a person to make mistakes so this means that not only would excess surveillance chip away at our humanity, it would also bring us even closer to an Orwellian society. Furthermore, it would be difficult to punish everyone all the time for simple things like breaking the speed limit. This could easily lead to an overload of small crimes and “enforcement [becoming] selective, and likely biased” (Hutson), which would lead to consequences far worse than going a few miles over while in a
Imagine being constantly watched. Everything you do, from the words you speak and places you go, to the thoughts you think, are constantly being documented, inspected, and analyzed. This was daily life for the characters in the dystopian society of Oceania. The level of surveillance portrayed in George Orwell’s novel 1984, is not as extreme and far off from our daily lives in 2018 as the reader may think. Surveillance levels in the world today are on the fast track to those in 1984.
In today’s modern society, privacy is seen as a basic right. However, the chances of being in a completely private space are getting smaller and smaller, reaching a point where complete privacy is hard to come by. No, you can’t just head over …show more content…
Shift your gaze up about four inches. Have you ever thought much about that little dot centered above your computer screen? Without even realizing it, people in today’s society are continuously surrounded by cameras. Embedded into some webcams, there is a software called a Remote Access Tool or an RAT. This software “allow[s] a third party to spy on a computer user from afar.” This includes rummaging through messages, observing browsing activities, photographing the computer screen, or even hijacking the webcam and taking photographs of the person on the other side of the screen. “RATs are widely used in a variety of contexts, some benign, others not. Across the board, abuse tends to be the rule.” (Massoglia) Maybe today’s society isn’t as different from Oceania as we are lead to …show more content…
It’s part of being a person to make mistakes so this means that not only would excess surveillance chip away at our humanity, it would also bring us even closer to an Orwellian society. Furthermore, it would be difficult to punish everyone all the time for simple things like breaking the speed limit. This could easily lead to an overload of small crimes and “enforcement [becoming] selective, and likely biased” (Hutson), which would lead to consequences far worse than going a few miles over while in a