Essay On Minority Report

With the power hungry Party and the most acknowledged face of Big Brother watching and monitoring everybody, the story of “1984” by George Orwell expresses the utmost control over their people and have the absolute power with their country Oceania. The Party believes that Big Brother will live on forever, because of the constant removal of those who are unfaithful and the rewriting of history. However, with the example of the main character showing disobedience against the Party, there is a chance for this type of ruling to fail and be destroyed by the people. The main possible cause of the fall of Big Brother is most likely the underestimation of the power of the people.

Today’s society is predicted as living in a world George Orwell envisioned in 1984. The system Orwell invented is compared to what the United States government is capable of doing. Government control of society is an essential subject due to the current mind set of the world today. In 1984, George Orwell represents how Big Brother is compared to today’s government, showing the consequences and dangers of a government with unlimited surveillance power.

Everyone has always wondered if people were ever watching them. Our technology today is capable to eavesdrop in on anyone’s conversations even if their phones are turned off. In the novel, “1984”, the party INGSOC uses telescreens to watch over the people and always know what they are up to. This denies the people’s rights and privileges to go about their business as they please. The technology we have today is almost exact to what big brother uses in George Orwell’s novel by taking over the public and private parts of our lives.

George Orwell’s 1984 is more than just a novel, it is a warning to a potential dystopian society of the future. Written in 1949, Orwell envisioned a totalitarian government under the figurehead Big Brother. In this totalitarian society, every thought and action is carefully examined for any sign of rebellion against the ruling party. Emotion has been abolished and love is nonexistent; an entire new language is being drafted to reduce human thought to the bare minimum. In a society such as the one portrayed in 1984, one is hardly human. In George Orwell’s 1984, the party uses fear, oppression, and propaganda to strip the people of their humanity.

“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”(Orwell 2), is a saying that surrounds society in the classic novel 1984. The author, George Orwell provides his audience with an abundant amount of themes throughout his writing. One very prominent one is Orwell’s psychological manipulation of his characters. As characters within this society are constantly surrounded by sayings such as, “WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”, and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”(Orwell 4), Orwell shows the ultimate type of control within his characters. Orwell is able to achieve such psychological manipulation in his characters through physical control and the abundance of technology. Without Orwell’s use of telescreens, his characters would be able to have their

1984, a novel by George Orwell, represents a dystopian society in which the people of Oceania are surveilled by the government almost all the time and have no freedoms. Today, citizens of the United States and other countries are watched in a similar way. Though different technological and personal ways of keeping watch on society than 1984, today’s government is also able to monitor most aspects of the people’s life. 1984 might be a dystopian society, but today’s condition seems to be moving towards that controlling state, where the citizens are surveilled by the government at all times.

It is a fool-proof system born to ensure absolute safety…but when it crumbles, would you go against everything it stands for just to save it? This is the platform that Philip K. Dick, author of the sci-fi short story "The Minority Report" (MR), has given us. Set in a futuristic New York City, we see Police Commissioner John A. Anderton as the founder of a promising new branch of policing: Precrime, a system that uses "Precogs" (mutated and retarded oracles) to predict all future crimes. However, the system appears to backfire when Anderton himself is accused to kill a man he's never even heard of. The movie adaptation by the same name also centers on a younger Chief Anderton, a respected employee of Precrime, predicted to murder a complete

Minority Report is a 2002 science fiction film directed by renowned director Steven Spielberg and is set in the year 2054 in Washington, D. C. The film revolves around an elite law enforcing squad; Precrime. The Precrime Division uses three genetically altered humans called Pre-Cogs whom possesses special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand. After each crime is foreseen and analyzed, Precrime police officers are sent to the crime location to apprehend the future murderers and place them under arrest. The future murderers are then put into a sleep state with a device called a "halo". Based on Minority Report, it suggests that humans are free willed beings and have the ability to alter the future that was

Orwell’s novel of 1984 depicts a dystopian society in which people are brainwashed with propaganda and bound to the chains of a strong dictatorship, also known as the Inner Party. Humanity has been filled with lies, as not a single person knows the truth that lies beneath the dictatorship. History is constantly being rewritten to mask their true identity. Any skeptical thoughts may make you disappear."Big Brother" is constantly observing you along with a telescreen watching every facial expression and recording any abnormal body language. However, two citizens called Winston and Julia rebel against "Big Brother's" totalitarian rule which triggers an astonishing warning towards future generations. Orwell is warning future generations of a society

1984 by George Orwell is a novel set in a dystopian near-future London, the chief city of Airstrip One, Oceania. The people in Oceania are under the control of the Party. Big Brother, or BB, is the face of the Party and the leader of this great power that rules over Oceania. He is a dominant figure who acts as a trustworthy entity for the people he governs, but ironically is their worst enemy in many ways. His posters, captioned “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”, can be seen everywhere in the streets of London. These posters give the reader a physical description of what one can imagine Big Brother to look like. He is a man of about forty-five with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features that make him look scary but leader-like. Most people in this society are unaware of how they are brainwashed and controlled by the Party. Big Brother controls Oceania with various carefully designed techniques, some of which are: keeping the Outer Party in control with the 24-hour surveillance, Reality Control and by controlling the proles -- by keeping them ignorant and luring them through privileges.

Mass surveillance is a word that has been thrown around every so often in the last few decades, especially ever since George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although this book was released over 60 years ago, some aspects of the book are seeming to become true in the United States, and other parts of the world today. The idea of mass surveillance isn’t so taboo anymore, as there are several programs ran by sovereign countries around the world which monitor their domestic citizens, as well as citizens and leaders of other foreign countries. With all of our technological communication advances since 1949, this age of information is only going to get more severe, and more tracking and monitoring will be done. The biggest offender of doing

Dystopia: a society characterized by human misery and oppression. A Dystopian world is controlled by a government that can do no wrong. They weed out the individuals and groups that have the thought or intend to commit their lives to “dethroning” the ruler; Big Brother. The government will do anything to protect their way of life. They will go to the extremes of changing the past to control the future. In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the citizens live in a definitive dystopian world where the government forces the comrades to fit Big Brother’s purpose.

Government surveillance in the past was not a big threat due to the limitations on technology; however, in the current day, it has become an immense power for the government. Taylor, author of a book on Electronic Surveillance supports, "A generation ago, when records were tucked away on paper in manila folders, there was some assurance that such information wouldn 't be spread everywhere. Now, however, our life stories are available at the push of a button" (Taylor 111). With more and more Americans logging into social media cites and using text-messaging devices, the more providers of metadata the government has. In her journal “The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit”, Anita L. Allen, an expert on privacy law, writes, “Contemporary technologies of data collection make secret, privacy invading surveillance easy and nearly irresistible. For every technology of confidential personal communication…there are one or more counter-technologies of eavesdropping” (Allen 1). Being in the middle of the Digital Age, we have to be much more careful of the kinds of information we put in our digital devices.

Fear is inevitably tied to the common saying “I am watching you”. When one’s actions are constantly monitored and privacy being relentlessly invaded, the individual soon will possess a sort of fear. In the novel Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, the government uses surveillance as a tool for exploiting the privacy of the people which then engages their fear.

1. Does the fallibility of the system—the fact that “minority reports” suggest that some few of those treated as murderers had a “possible alternative future” in which they would not actually have committed the crime— make that system morally unjustifiable according to Act Utilitarianism?