1984 Final Reflection

 I think one of the reasons that 1984 is still talked about is because of how accurate the dystopian society is to our current world today. It is not like Orwell made up the dystopia completely from his imagination; it was based on the 1948 world he lived in and what he thought could happen in the future if the government became in total control. One trend that I saw that I thought was interesting was how book sales spike during controversial political events involving the government. The book is almost like a warning that this dystopia could be our near future. However, we have to think: how do we know this is not already happening now? There are many arguments showing that the current world we live in is very “Orwellian” through our technology. Our technology today is far more impressive than the technology in 1984 with most of our lives being surrounded by screens. We watch our phones and televisions every day and the government/companies can use that to track our private information. Like the two minutes of hate, social media makes it very easy for users to collectively shame people in online mobs and is hard to resist because it is just so easy to bandwagon with a few taps of your fingers. It is kind of scary how corrupted our current world can be as it already has so many parallels with 1984’s dystopia. In order to prevent us from an “Orwellian” world, we need to keep technology from taking over everything because then it concentrates the power in a small number of people that can abuse that power. They would have control over all our everyday technologies, thus controlling our lives like Big Brother. It is very important to still have real life people doing tasks without the help of technology. Technology is not necessarily bad, but it can become harmful if we rely on it and make it our life.