Kevin O'Keefe well describes the all-pervasive use of video (digital technology) via the Internet to capture, instantly disseminate, and record for history any events deemed worth recording by someone, anyone. He ends the letter by adapting Descartes' famous philosophical proposition “I think, therefore I am” to “I saw the video, therefore it happened.”
Well, not quite. O'Keefe also observes that “we were introduced to the idea that Big Brother (a benevolent government) was watching us” in George Orwell's prescient novel 1984.
Benevolent? I don't think so. 1984 was set in a time of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation, dictated by a political system governed by a privileged party of the elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as “thought crimes.”
Some of the language in Orwell's novel - such as “Big Brother” - can now be found in contemporary dictionaries. One such example, one of my favorites, is “newspeak,” which Orwell describes succinctly as a language “designed to diminish the range of thought.”...