Tag Archives: The Future
The Impact of ‘1984’ on Freedom of Speech and political Language.
Photograph: George Orwell at work on his trusty old typewriter. (Public Domain).
The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O’Brien.
Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel’s themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials – alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.
Orwellian
George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that well being is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.
Big Brother (is watching you)
A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers’ eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.
Room 101
Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 – rather like those tower blocks that don’t have a 13th floor – thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.
Thought Police
An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell’s enforcement brigade.
Thought crime
See “Thought Police” above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.
Newspeak
For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.
Doublethink
Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are double thinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there.
This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of “doublethink” when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical – but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub.
by Oliver Marre
Read the Full article via Source: 1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell | Books | The Guardian
Film: Blade Runner 2049.
An incredible lucid dream … Blade Runner 2049. Image Credit: Photograph by Allstar/Warner Bros
by PeterBradshaw
With this visually staggering film, director Denis Villeneuve brings us to a kind of Ozymandias moment. It just has to be experienced on the biggest screen possible.
Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.
This is the sequel to the 1982 sci-fi classic, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, starring Harrison Ford as a “blade runner”, a futureworld cop whose job is to track down and kill disobedient almost-human androids known as replicants.
The 2017 follow-up simply couldn’t be any more of a triumph: a stunning enlargement and improvement. Its mind-boggling, cortex-wobbling, craniofacial-splintering images are there to trigger awe or even a kind of ecstatic despair at the idea of a post-human future, and what it means to imagine the wreck of our current form of homo sapiens.
Evolution has not finished yet, any more than it was finished 100,000 years ago. As so often in literature and cinema, we are reminded that science fiction is there to tackle big ideas, and makes realist genres look flimsy and parochial.
This film delivers pure hallucinatory craziness that leaves you hyperventilating.
Read on further: Source: The Guardian
Was the forerunner of the Smartphone the “Wireless Telegraph” of 1906.
Replace these “wireless telegraphs” with smartphones, update the dress a little, and this vision from a 1906 issue of Punch magazine could easily be for 110 years in the future.
Part of a series of “forecasts” for the year to come, the caption reads:
“These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady receives an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results.”
It’s a reminder that the idea of technology leading to a breakdown in “authentic” human interaction is a worry not solely limited to our age.
Punch seemed to have a knack for uncanny predictions of distant technologies to come.
Source: A Vision of Isolating Technology from 1906 | The Public Domain Review
H.G. Wells and his Predictions for the Future.
by Brian Handwerk, smithsonian.com
Science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells conjured some futuristic visions that haven’t (yet) come true: a machine that travels back in time, a man who turns invisible, and a Martian invasion that destroys southern England.
But for a man born 150 years ago, many of Wells’s other predictions about the modern world have proven amazingly prescient.
Wells, born in 1866, was trained as a scientist, a rarity among his literary contemporaries, and was perhaps the most important figure in the genre that would become science fiction. Writers in this tradition have a history not just of imagining the future as is might be, but of inspiring others to make it a reality.
In 2012, Smithsonian.com published a top ten list of inventions inspired by sci-fi, ranging from Robert H. Goddard’s liquid-fuelled rocket to the cell phone. “Wells’s was an imagination in a hurry, he wanted to get to the future sooner than it was going to happen. That’s why he’s so predictive in his writing,” explains Simon James, head of the English Studies department at Durham University and the editor of the official journal of the H.G. Wells society .
Wells’s ideas have also endured because he was a standout storyteller, James adds. No less a writer than Joseph Conrad agreed. “I am always powerfully impressed by your work. Impressed is the word, O Realist of the Fantastic!” he wrote Wells after reading The Invisible Man.
Here are some of the incredible H.G. Wells predictions that have come true, as well as some that haven’t—at least not yet. Phones, Email, and Television.
In Men Like Gods (1923), Wells invites readers to a futuristic utopia that’s essentially Earth after thousands of years of progress.
In this alternate reality, people communicate exclusively with wireless systems that employ a kind of co-mingling of voicemail and email-like properties.
“For in Utopia, except by previous arrangement, people do not talk together on the telephone,” he writes. “A message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages.
And any that one wishes to repeat can be repeated. Then he talks back to the senders and dispatches any other messages he wishes.
The transmission is wireless.”Wells also imagined forms of future entertainment.
In When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), the protagonist rouses from two centuries of slumber to a dystopian London in which citizens use wondrous forms of technology like the audio book, airplane and television—yet suffer systematic oppression and social injustice.
Read on further via The Many Futuristic Predictions of H.G. Wells That Came True | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian
“Machine Dreams” by Sauer and Prosavec.
