1984 privacy essay

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Invasion of Privacy in 1984

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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Introduction, the concept of big brother, the consequences of invasion of privacy, societal questions about security and personal freedom, the resilience of the human spirit.

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Lack of Privacy in 1984 Essay

Discuss the theme of surveillance and lack of privacy in George Orwell’s ‘1984’. Analyze how the novel portrays a dystopian society where the government monitors and controls every aspect of life. Draw parallels to contemporary issues in digital privacy, government surveillance, and individual freedoms. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of George Orwells 1984.

How it works

Privacy is a loose term in our world today because no one abides by it and the privacy of many people is invaded every day. People don’t even think about being watched when they’re posting personal experiences in their life on social media. Invasion of privacy is a serious issue concerning the Internet, as e-mails can be read and/or encrypted, and cookies can track a user and store personal information. Lack of privacy policies and employee monitoring threatens security also.

Individuals should have the right to protect themselves as much as possible from privacy invasion and they shouldn’t have to give in to the lowered standards of safety being pursued by the government. The government has the ability and justification to go through a person’s social media account, listen to phone calls, and read text messages as a way of narrowing down possible suspects for terrorism.

Technology is constantly upgrading and internet is being used daily worldwide which creates unique challenges for individuals privacy rights while there are regulators looking to preserve both privacy rights and the improvement of technology. Today people also need protection from large companies but the law has been slow to provide such protection. People today are concerned about data being collected about them and believe they should be informed about it, but some people do not take their time to read the terms and conditions and privacy policies because its too long to read and they just want to accept to get whatever they want. In 1984, George Orwell is warning us and exposing the world that there is a lack of privacy in technology and that we need to be aware of everything we do and say because someone is always watching or listening.

In 1984, Orwell includes microphones in the bushes in the outskirts of London to warn the reader that someone is listening even if you are in a place that you think no one can hear or see you. In the book Julia and Winston want to meet somewhere, where they will not be heard or seen by other people or a telescreen. They decide to go out into the countryside of London where there were no telescreens but there may be microphones hidden in bushes; “There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized” (Orwell 117). Winston and Julia were being very risky for them to be talking and doing forbidden things when they could be recorded. The microphones being hidden in the bushes shows that someone is always watching or listening even if you don’t suspect it. With the microphones listening for noises or motion they could easily pick up Winston and Julia walking out to the countryside and that is invading into their privacy when they don’t want others knowing about what they are doing. The microphones are there to expose the people that go out to the outskirts of London to try to get some privacy just like Orwell wants to expose how their privacy is being invaded all of the time.

From microphones to telescreens, in 1984, Orwell uses telescreens, that can’t be turned off, to show how the government and Big Brother are constantly watching the citizens and they know their every move. In the beginning of the book, Winston is walking into his flat to and decided not to use the lift but instead use the stairs. Once he got into his home the telescreen was watching him and he couldn’t turn it off, so what he did was, “Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely” (Orwell 2). Winston is constantly being watched and listened to by the telescreens and it is breaching his privacy. The telescreens are showing that literally someone is always watching you and you every move and action. Winston can not turn the telescreen he can only turn the volume down which means that he will never have any privacy. Orwell is warning that technology is evolving and watching your every move and invading into people’s privacy and Winstons privacy every day.

On the other hand, in the real world in today’s society technology is always listening to the things we say and can interpret it in the wrong way. There have been multiple mishaps in technology and one of them was with the Amazon Echo and a couple. The Amazon Echo overheard a couples conversation, recorded their conversation, and sent it to one of the couples coworkers. The reason it could have sent was that the couple said keywords to set off the Amazon Echo. The female Danielle said, ‘’I felt invaded,’ Danielle told KIRO. ‘A total privacy invasion. Immediately, I said, I’m never plugging that device in again, because I can’t trust it.’” (Wamsley). The Echo was listening to this couples conversation because the device is always on and waiting for code or keywords for it to activate, but it is always listening for those words. As Danielle said it was invading their privacy and they are lucky that it was not a confidential conversation and it was just them talking about hardwood floors. The technology of the Amazon Echo is always listening to every conversation and that is invading people’s privacy. The privacy of this couple was violated and there will be many more in the future because there is a lack of privacy in technology.

With there being privacy issues with Amazon there is also an ongoing issue with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg leaking profile data and information. In their most recent publication they exposed 50 million facebook users accounts. In the article by the New York Times, it said, “The breach, which was discovered this week, was the largest in the company’s 14-year history. The attackers exploited a feature in Facebook’s code to gain access to user accounts and potentially take control of them” (Isaac & Frenkel). The technology exposed the data of many users and put them at risk of getting hacked and their privacy was violated. Technology has come a long way but things like this are what makes it scary because it is so easy for our privacy to be invaded and for our information and data to be used by third parties and hackers. The hackers had the potential to take control over these users accounts and manipulate them. The privacy of all of the 50 million facebook users that were hacked was violated and technology is the cause of that.

In 1984, the privacy of the civilians was non existent and they did not have any due to the government and Big Brother watching over them all the time through the microphones and the telescreens. Winston and Julia had very little privacy in 1984. In the real world today privacy breaches are happening all around the internet and through technology. The couple had their conversation send to another person without them asking the Amazon Echo to do that proving that the Echo is alway listening to their conversations. Also the information and data on 50 million facebook users accounts was breached and had the potential for hackers to take over the account. When dealing with privacy always read over the terms and conditions because companies will trick you with the fine print and always know that technology or someone could be watching and listening invading into your privacy.

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PapersOwl.com. (2021). Lack of Privacy in 1984 Essay . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/lack-of-privacy-in-1984-essay/ [Accessed: 20 Apr. 2024]

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