Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Postman argued that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was more prescient than Orwell's 1984, because in his book Huxley portrayed a citizenry perfectly willing to give up its most sacred possessions for trivial things.
Postman's key point was that Big Brother didn't need to bother watching John Doe or controlling him, because John Doe probably was already willing to be controlled by forces that rendered him harmless to Big Brother. He talked of a certain dumbing down of American thought and action due to the effects of television and mass advertising and all the phenomena he then observed have since been accelerated by the Internet and social media. Just a year after 1984, the year for which Orwell's most famous book was named, the late social critic Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. hasn't yet gone through an Orwellian transformation. Images via Getty Images)įirst, let's bear in mind some reasons that the U.S. A bronze statue of George Orwell outside Broadcasting House, London.
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