To my delight, one of the books I enjoyed the most in reading was ‘1984’, written by George Orwell in
Big Brother: an entity with absolute power capable of controlling the party members in the society of 1984 novel. In the Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Big Brother is signalled either as a supreme authority or a tyrant. (Page 425 of the index).
Black white: The acceptance of what authorities say without questioning.
Thought crime: the crime to dare to even think that the authorities could be wrong in a way.
Face crime: (careful, it’s not face book) A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety that carries with it the suggestion of abnormality or of having something to hide.
Thinkpol: The though police whose role is to eliminate thought crime through spying and total surveillance.
Telescreen: an electronic device like a TV screen used to spy or monitor people in their homes or at workplace.
One of the common questions that comes to the reader’s mind after finishing this book is how close we are as a society to the Orwellian perspective of the world. As regards this, it is interesting to observe the spreading of rumours about RFID microchip implantations on humans in a distant future. Such a thing may lead one to believe that the future of our society does not seem to be so far from the paradigmatic vision proposed by Orwell in ‘1984.’
But, what is a RFID? It is a microchip whose acronym means Radio Frequency Identification Device. It is very tiny, as big as the size of a rice grain, and can be inserted underneath the skin of animals or hidden inside things. What is it used for? Technically speaking, it sends a radio frequency signal, or radio waves that can be traced by satellites. These send all the information collected to a PC in order to determine specific parameters such us identification or location. For the time being, such devices are used exclusively in industrial processes or by scientists to monitor groups of animals. However, in a not so distant future, as it is presently rumoured and debated on the Internet, such technology could be used on humans in the form of microchip implantations under the skin. This high technology could be implemented to collect from people valuable information such as insurance company, I.D number, name, and so on. In addition to this, there are those who suspect that such a new technology could possibly be used to monitor and spy people by security service enterprises in the future, exactly like it occurs in Orwell’s novel, but in a real context.
As a conclusion, provided that all these vague rumours of human micro chipping were true, then George Orwell’s vision, of a society of a supposed Big Brother watching all of us, would be very closer to the society to come in the future.
