Video SparkNotes: Orwell's 1984 Summary

Sales of George Orwell's 1984 surge after Kellyanne Conway's 'alternative facts' | Books Sales of George Orwell’s dystopian drama 1984 have soared after Kellyanne Conway, adviser to the reality-TV-star-turned-president, Donald Trump, used the phrase “alternative facts” in an interview. As of Tuesday, the book was the sixth best-selling book on Amazon. Comparisons were made with the term “newspeak” used in the 1949 novel, which was used to signal a fictional language that aims at eliminating personal thought and also “doublethink”. The connection was initially made on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Conway’s use of the term was in reference to White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comments about last week’s inauguration attracting “the largest audience ever”. In 1984, a superstate wields extreme control over the people and persecutes any form of independent thought.

UK security agencies unlawfully collected data for decade | World news British security agencies have secretly and unlawfully collected massive volumes of confidential personal data, including financial information, on citizens for more than a decade, senior judges have ruled. The investigatory powers tribunal, which is the only court that hears complaints against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, said the security services operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years. Privacy campaigners described the ruling as “one of the most significant indictments of the secret use of the government’s mass surveillance powers” since Edward Snowden first began exposing the extent of British and American state digital surveillance of citizens in 2013. “The BPD regime failed to comply with the ECHR principles which we have above set out throughout the period prior to its avowal in March 2015.

History - Historic Figures: George Orwell (1903 - 1950) Context Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security | US news US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments. The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet". But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users.

Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump | The panel Jean Seaton: The seeds were sown during the George W Bush era Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four again, now, hurts. And I’m not the only one to be revisiting it: sales of the book have soared in the past week. What you had previously thought you read at a cool, intellectual distance (a great book about “over there”, somewhere in the past or future) now feels intimate, bitter and shocking. Orwell is writing of now when he writes, “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.” Of course, we all have to keep our heads (especially we have to keep our heads). The post-truth era certainly shares aspects of the dystopian world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Then there is privacy – Orwell puts the diary and the private self at the heart of his writing. But this new world has been a while coming. Yet these are the obvious big lies. Trump is not O’Brien. Tim Crook: Trump takes doublethink to a new extreme Orwell never set foot in America.

Utopian and dystopian fiction Genres of literature that explore social and political structures Utopian and dystopian fiction are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. More than 400 utopian works in the English language were published prior to the year 1900, with more than a thousand others appearing during the 20th century.[2] This increase is partially associated with the rise in popularity of genre fiction, science fiction and young adult fiction more generally, but also larger scale social change that brought awareness of larger societal or global issues, such as technology, climate change, and growing human population. Subgenres[edit] Utopian fiction[edit] Dystopian fiction[edit] Dystopias usually extrapolate elements of contemporary society, and thus can be read as political warnings. Examples[edit] Combinations[edit] See also[edit]

Revealed: Rio Tinto's plan to use drones to monitor workers' private lives | World news In the remote Australian outback, multinational companies are embarking on a secretive new kind of mining expedition. Rio Tinto has long mined the Pilbara region of Western Australia for iron ore riches but now the company is seeking to extract a rather different kind of resource – its own employees, for data. Thousands of Rio Tinto personnel live in company-run mining camps, spending not just work hours but leisure and home time in space controlled by their employer – which in this emerging era of smart infrastructure presents the opportunity to hoover up every detail of their lives. Rio Tinto is no stranger to using technology to improve efficiency, having replaced human-operated vehicles with automated haul trucks and trains controlled out of a central operations centre in Perth. The company is embarking on an attempt to manage its remaining human workers in the same way, and privacy advocates fear it could set a precedent that extends well beyond the mining industry.

Big Brother Trump Nineteen Eighty-Four Nineteen-Eighty-Four is a novel published by George Orwell in 1949. It was his last work, written shortly before his death from a tubercular haemorrhage in 1950. It presents a dystopian view of a world which has been taken over by totalitarianism. The novel’s main protagonist, Winston Smith, briefly attempts small forms of resistance against the Party, which rules with the figurehead of Big Brother. In the ideological context of the mid-20th-century cold war between American-style capitalism and the communism of the Soviet Union, the novel was frequently co-opted as a propaganda tool. Indeed due to its vast popularity, Orwell scholars such as Bernard Crick have complained of its widespread misinterpretation; it should, Crick suggested, be read as a satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift. Much of the novel’s phraseology and many of its ideas have passed into general use.