George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, looks at the world of Oceania through the perspective of fictional Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist. The novel begins with Winston trying to hide himself from the government’s ever-present cameras, the eyes of Big Brother, to write his thoughts in a journal he has illegally purchased on the black-market. In Winston’s world, not just the action of writing his thoughts down has been banned, but the mere existence of personal thoughts is a crime--“thoughtcrime.” Winston is aware that this crime is among the highest in his society, yet his desire to track his own thoughts, to access and explore his own mind through writing, is strong enough for which to risk his life. This opening scene of the novel provides the perfect introduction to the two definitions of privacy that will be explored in this unit: external access and private thought.
Most obvious is the intrusion in the citizens’ lives by Big Brother, epitomized by the telescreens that provide continuous surveillance. Citizens don’t know if they are being watched by the cameras and listening devices that seem ubiquitous in this society, but a sense of fear pervades that at any given moment, at home, at work, or out in public, Big Brother is watching you:
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. (6)
It is the sense of not knowing that keeps citizens in check. There are even points in the book where you wonder if the government is really watching at all (we learn without a doubt by the end that they in fact are watching).
The ubiquitous cameras are no longer merely a plot device for a dystopian fictional world. Look up in any corner in any city in America and odds are there is a camera observing you. Taken a step further, the Chinese government is utilizing the same facial-recognition AI (artificial intelligence) that Google and Facebook use to find your face in friends’ pictures. Xi Jinping’s regime is taking a page right out of Orwell’s book and is using this AI to watch and punish citizens who step outside of the nation’s strict laws. Amy Webb reports: “Chinese citizens are learning to live with automated monitoring and consequences of stepping out of line. Crime is down, and social unrest is curtailed, and for a time the middle and upper classes preserve the status quo. [...] For now at least, it seems like privacy, religious freedom, sexual identity and free speech are reasonable trade-offs for earning a desirable social credit score.” (7)
It is important to draw a distinction here between the fictional world of Oceania and the technological world we live in. Orwell was writing on the heels of World War II; his novel was a warning of the advancement of fascist ideals that he saw as a threat to freedom. While the fictional world he imagines has strong corollaries with the state of surveillance in China, the technological surveillance in the United States is significantly different. Obviously, there are elements of government intrusion on our lives, but the larger issue in our country are those intrusions by private corporations that citizens willingly support by purchasing and installing “smart” devices for their homes, posting and sharing all aspects of their lives online, and by approving ever encroaching permissions on the apps they download to their phones. While this is not quite the world Orwell imagined in his dystopia, there are still startling parallels that will be explored in the content of the unit.
While the intrusiveness of the government is the privacy issue that stands out most plainly in the novel, Orwell brings up for our consideration another key aspect of privacy that will be explored more deeply in this unit: that of private thought. In our world where everyone can (and to a huge degree does) instantly publish every passing thought, is there still value in our own thoughts being private? In his history of privacy in America, Frederick S. Lane points out that the limit to the security of our thoughts is within our heads. “Once those thoughts are expressed externally in any fashion--speech, diary, letter, telephone conversation, e-mail, instant message--our ability to control the spread of information is diminished by varying degrees.” (8) In 1984, though the government has banned this type of private thinking, Winston is willing to risk his life to begin tracking his thoughts and to try to remember the world before Big Brother. In the real world, adolescents obviously still have private thoughts, but from what I have seen they are more willing to publish their thoughts, no matter how personal to the web via social media, blogs, or vlogs.
By exploring these and other aspects of privacy through both Orwell’s 1984 and other supplementary texts, students will develop a much fuller vision of their own private lives in the digital age.
