George Orwell's 1984, Part 2: Crash Course Literature #402
In which John Green continues discussing George Orwell's 1984. Today we're talking about what the novel 1984 has to say about what some have called today's surveillance society. We'll also...
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Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course literature, and today we’re going back to the future–that is now past–to George Orwell’s 1984, which imagines a terrifying world in which every human activity is recorded and monitored. How unpleasant would that be, he said staring into a camera lens. So, as mentioned in our previous episode, the Newspeak language created in the book was intended “to make speech [...] as nearly as possible independent of consciousness” (319). In an episode of Crash Course Psychology, my brother, Hank, defined “consciousness” as “our awareness of ourselves and our environment.” I would add that consciousness also explains our ability to experience life and to feel emotions. So can the structure of a language actua...
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Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course literature, and today we’re going back to the future–that is now past–to George Orwell’s 1984, which imagines a terrifying world in which every human activity is recorded and monitored. How unpleasant would that be, he said staring into a camera lens. So, as mentioned in our previous episode, the Newspeak language created in the book was intended “to make speech [...] as nearly as possible independent of consciousness” (319). In an episode of Crash Course Psychology, my brother, Hank, defined “consciousness” as “our awareness of ourselves and our environment.” I would add that consciousness also explains our ability to experience life and to feel emotions. So can the structure of a language actua...
