Article Title: What Ails a Woman’s Heart
Article Summary
This article brings to light the grim reality of using digital media and technology and points out how this shows a striking resemblance to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. His novel depicts a story where the world is under a constant surveillance of telescreens. Whistleblower Edward Snowden was apt at explicitly comparing widespread government surveillance to what Orwell had imagined. Today, we are at once surrounded by telescreens and so far past them that Orwell couldn’t have seen our world coming. However, in his novel, Orwell gives us a couple of clues about where telescreens came from. Considering them, it becomes clear that the corporate world rather than our current government is the likely source of freedom’s demise.
The ideology of choice itself might be how the erosion of choice really starts. When our choice to use a service means providing our data for the corporate world- that’s when the erosion of choice and freedom begins. Today we all have “telescreens” because we feel the urge to have it, or we find them so convenient that they feel compulsory. The companies conveniently try to influence their customers by creating urgency or urge to be a victim of new functionality. Until now we had the choice of using these functionalities, but when it becomes a compulsion-of-sorts to use technology for migrant workers, or when filling out the census online, we’ve reached to a point what Orwell had imagined.
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Words to learn from this Article:
Dystopian: relating to or denoting an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one
Protagonist: the leading character or one of the major characters in a play, film, novel, etc.
Explicitly: in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt
Omnipresent: widely or constantly encountered; widespread
Ubiquity: the fact of appearing everywhere or of being very common
Totalitarian: relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state
Grain of salt: to accept a statement while maintaining a degree of skepticism about its truth
Murky: dark and gloomy
Reluctance: unwillingness or disinclination to do something
Unfettered: not confined or restricted
Winnow: remove (people or things) from a group until only the best ones are left
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