My nephew has to write an essay about 1984 for school and we got to talking about what kind of things Orwell predicted that have come true or not come true. One thing that that has come true is that we are being watched more, but a lot of people are actually putting a lot of what might be considered private information online via blogging, facebook, youtube and all these other neato social networking sites that allow you to 'publish yourself.' One man who was hauled in for being potential terrorist publishes everything he does to avoid having problems: The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online.
And could Orwell have predicted that the US could be involved in a war for five years (Iraq) and it wouldn't be the most important thing on people's minds and for most probably wouldn't even make the top ten on a daily basis?
I think of it as Big Brother overload. We're being overloaded with all these messages of fear and we're being watched all the time so that the newest generation of adults is reacting by just not reacting to it.
If this is where we are today where will we be in 2048? What would today's Orwell think up? What are the unexpected consequences of the directions the world is going in today? If I had to guess I'd say the single biggest influence in the next forty years will be global warming. Whether efforts or taken to change direction or not, global warming will determine the day to day lives of people forty years from now.
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