"That's no Phone. That's My Tracker." (Peter Maass, and Megha Rajagopalan, Op-Ed piece)
"Long Beach police to Use 400 Cameras Citywide to Fight Crime" (Richard Winton)
Module Description and Background: This module explores George Orwell’s dark, complex, and controversial novel 1984. The novel is full of big ideas and themes: totalitarian rule, surveillance technology, mind control, propaganda, the role of the individual versus the collective, the relation of language to thought, and even the nature of reality and perception. This module is designed to help students go beyond the simple plotline and engage with some of the larger philosophical ideas and themes, in part by carefully reading sections of the novel that are often omitted: the chapters from the fictitious book by Emmanuel Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and the appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.” In effect, the novel integrates a literary narrative with fictional expository texts. The culminating writing assignment offers one of four prompts, each of which explores one of the themes of the novel. Students are asked to use material from their notes and annotations of the novel to support their position on the issue of the prompt. Science fiction often explores ethical and moral issues created by new technology. Many of the technologies explored in science fiction stories of the 1940s and 1950s have become a part of our everyday world, and we live with the consequences. Science fiction writers don’t actually try to predict the future. Instead, they ask “What if?” questions about trends and possibilities in the present. We can think of science fiction as a kind of thought experiment: If we create this technology, what will happen? How will it work? How will it change society? How will it change people? Should we do it at all? George Orwell’s 1984 is sometimes not recognized as a science fiction novel. There are no rocket ships or aliens, and the date is now in the past. However, it is clearly about an imagined future extrapolated from post-World War II political trends, advances in techniques of propaganda, and the potential of surveillance technology to increase the control of a totalitarian government over its citizens. Now surveillance technology is vastly more powerful and pervasive than Orwell ever imagined, and we use much of it voluntarily. What if technology allowed our government to watch and listen to us every moment? In 1984, Orwell explores what that would be like. However, 1984 is not just about surveillance technology. To justify its actions, the government of Oceania and its leader, Big Brother, continuously rewrite history to fit the political needs of the present so that the past becomes a convenient fiction. What is history if the newspapers and other records are continuously being rewritten? Big Brother also fills a party member’s time with work and daily public rituals so that a citizen is rarely alone and is expected to display a constant public patriotism in behavior and speech. What does it mean to be an individual if every aspect of behavior is controlled, observed, and regimented? Though Big Brother can control behavior and speech, one would think that surely a citizen’s private thoughts remain his or her own. However, Orwell imagines a government that attempts to control even the very thoughts of its citizens through the creation of a language, Newspeak, in which “thoughtcrime” is impossible to express. Life in Oceania is a dreary and frightening prospect indeed. Orwell divides the novel into three sections. He also includes parts of a fictitious book (interpolated into Section Two), The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emanuel Goldstein, Big Brother’s political scapegoat and ideological enemy, and an appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” at the end of the book. This module will be divided into four sections. The first section will explore the technology and concepts of “surveillance” as they exist in our current society before moving into the first section of the novel. The second section will explore the appendix because “Newspeak” is such an important factor in Big Brother’s ideological control. The third and fourth sections will explore the last two sections of the novel. There are also two supplementary texts: a newspaper article, “Long Beach Police to Use 400 Cameras Citywide to Fight Crime,” and an op-ed piece, “That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker.”