How big of a role can media play in a society? In the novel “1984”, George Orwell builds a strong media system as a tool for the party to suppress and prevent class conflicts: it gives the public and outer party members an illusion of truth, while maintain their attention distracted from what is truly happening. The most noticeable contribution of media towards the totalitarian state of 1984 is trapping people and outer party members’ attention on what the party wants them to see, and everywhere is swarm with those repetitive messages that chock free minds. In the novel, the daily mandatory “Two Minutes Hate” can make almost everyone to show the worst hatred toward Emmanuel Goldstein (15), a person that they could doubt even to his very existence.
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The changes of actual weekly ration of chocolate in the novel and what the media said about the changes are almost opposite: When it is reduced from thirty grams to twenty (just a few months after the Ministry of Plenty promised officially that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during the whole year) (loc664), the media says it has increased to twenty grams, and everyone is happy about it. The message is so obviously wrong as people can or should be able to see how the chocolate they receive has become really small, but with the repetition of radio and newspaper and SmartScreen, the lie became truth. Like David Model wrote in “Deception”: “The population can be easily indoctrinated through the propaganda of the state.” (279) With advanced propaganda technics, and the imperceptibly influence of “doublethink”, people choose to abandon what they once believed to be true, and “swallowed” (75) what the media said to be true, without questioning, not only for chocolate, but also for almost every aspect of their life: “As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies—more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.” …show more content…
“Thought police” and “thought crime” emerged to serve the purpose of controlling information and eliminating dissenter, as Model wrote: “Those who week to indoctrinate us are …… monopolistic control over the channels through which we obtain our information” (280). In this case, the public and outer party members do not have any other source of information that they could obtain other than what the party says. The party turned human natures like sex and parenthood into “duty to the party” (167) that no one should enjoy just because “the sex impulse and family were dangerous to the Party” (168), they established Junior Anti-Sex League, and “The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.” (168) The horrible thing is, even the life that the party taught people to live turned its back to human nature, people still believe that they are free and happy, just because the party told them so. People work and breed and die like slaves while being convinced that they are free and full of
The changes of actual weekly ration of chocolate in the novel and what the media said about the changes are almost opposite: When it is reduced from thirty grams to twenty (just a few months after the Ministry of Plenty promised officially that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during the whole year) (loc664), the media says it has increased to twenty grams, and everyone is happy about it. The message is so obviously wrong as people can or should be able to see how the chocolate they receive has become really small, but with the repetition of radio and newspaper and SmartScreen, the lie became truth. Like David Model wrote in “Deception”: “The population can be easily indoctrinated through the propaganda of the state.” (279) With advanced propaganda technics, and the imperceptibly influence of “doublethink”, people choose to abandon what they once believed to be true, and “swallowed” (75) what the media said to be true, without questioning, not only for chocolate, but also for almost every aspect of their life: “As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies—more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.” …show more content…
“Thought police” and “thought crime” emerged to serve the purpose of controlling information and eliminating dissenter, as Model wrote: “Those who week to indoctrinate us are …… monopolistic control over the channels through which we obtain our information” (280). In this case, the public and outer party members do not have any other source of information that they could obtain other than what the party says. The party turned human natures like sex and parenthood into “duty to the party” (167) that no one should enjoy just because “the sex impulse and family were dangerous to the Party” (168), they established Junior Anti-Sex League, and “The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.” (168) The horrible thing is, even the life that the party taught people to live turned its back to human nature, people still believe that they are free and happy, just because the party told them so. People work and breed and die like slaves while being convinced that they are free and full of