When it was published nearly 60 years ago, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four must have seemed a mite bit fanciful with its vivid descriptions of a totalitarian future. The all-seeing, all-hearing ‘Telescreens’ and that most sinister of fictional inventions, the ‘Thought Police’, would have sent chills up and down the spines of its first-edition readers as they watched the dawn break on the Cold War era.
But it was just a work of fiction, wasn’t it? And while there are many examples of prophetic fiction, perhaps not least being the late Arthur C Clarke’s predictions about geostationary orbiting communications satellites and H G Wells’ weirdly accurate, late nineteenth century musings on the gadgetry we now take for granted a hundred or so years later, Orwell’s vision was a bit off the mark, don’t you think? Well, possibly not.
In recent interviews, the man credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was critical about our apparent recklessness when providing personal data to social networking sites. Moreover, he expressed concern about ISPs buying into the services of special companies that track individuals’ browsing habits to provide valuable marketing profiles to advertisers. What was all that nonsense about Telescreens earlier on?
Clearly, it’s no new phenomenon that we are a much observed population. Like our supposed proximity to that cellar and sewer dwelling rodent, we are never really that far away from a CCTV camera, for one thing.
But, of course, we do have a choice; we don’t have to register with social networking websites and neither do we have to go online, own a credit card, drive in a congestion controlled zone of a city, pass through airport departure gates, etc, etc – all of which will track us just as surely as Orwell’s ubiquitous Telescreen.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to live without all these things today, so our ‘official’ identities seem to be defined by the baggage we accumulate in the modern world. My late mother had neither passport nor driving licence and, up until quite late in her life, no bank or credit account either. Imagine her frustration as she tried to assert her identity to some hapless functionary.
So, are we only as good as the bits of paper and plastic that we carry around with us? Of course not. But it does make you think, doesn’t it?
Les Hunt
Editor