The Guardian, Friday 24 August EDT

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Ira Lambert
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1 Why George Orwell is as relevant today as ever If George Orwell was guilty of anything, it was not of being too leftwing but too intellectually honest Geoffrey Wheatcroft The Guardian, Friday 24 August EDT Why Orwell Matters is the title of a book published some years ago by my much- lamented if misguided friend Christopher Hitchens. Whether Orwell matters, he clearly still fascinates, stimulates and enrages. How is it that a writer who died in 1950, at only 46, should be one of the most controversial figures of our own time? During the war he spent some years working for the BBC ("wasting my own time and the public's money", as he characteristically said), and the George Orwell Memorial Trust has proposed that a statue of perhaps the most famous employee in the corporation's history should be put up outside its new HQ. When Joan Bakewell brought this up with Mark Thompson, the outgoing director general, she was apparently told no, the proposal was "far too leftwing". If Thompson thinks Orwell automatically counts as "leftwing" then he hasn't been following the story closely. It's true that Orwell said: "Every line of serious work that I have written has been, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." But his posthumous fate was to be execrated by part of the left to which he thought he belonged while he was appropriated by a right he abhorred. Even to those of us who reckon ourselves Orwellians he remains a mystery. He was a great something, but a great what? His pre- war novels are good but not very good, and although Robert Harris has called Nineteen Eighty- Four the most influential novel ever written, Orwell wasn't a great novelist in the sense of George Eliot or Joyce. And various ditties he unwisely published make it clear that he was no poet either. When Bakewell calls him "the greatest British journalist of his day" it's something of a commonplace, but he was sometimes rather a bad journalist. During the second world war, Orwell contributed a "London letter" to Partisan Review, the radical US magazine. Most of us who write for a living might expect that if we filed a piece that began, "There is very little political news", or concluded, "There are very few literary developments to report", it would be spiked without much ado. As to his grasp of everyday politics, see him reporting in 1942 that Churchill would soon fall and be replaced by the towering figure of Sir Stafford Cripps. It's when he wanders from Westminster that he comes alive. When the "special relationship" is extolled, or the heroic wartime Anglo- American alliance, I think of Orwell recording the joke in London pubs that "Chamberlain appeased Hitler but Churchill appeases America". And by late 1943, it was "difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now occupied territory. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the negroes." 1

2 Orwell never went to university but despite or because of that he was a brilliant literary critic, whether on great writers such as Dickens or "good bad" books (as was Hitchens, as it happens). After his death his shroud was stolen and waved by militant US anti- communists whom he would have detested. Joseph McCarthy began his campaign of mendacious demagoguery only weeks after Orwell died, and yet not long before his death Orwell had specifically warned the Americans against fighting totalitarianism with totalitarian means. He attracted a fusillade of contempt from the quasi- Stalinist left, whether Raymond Williams, who said that Orwell "created the conditions for defeat and despair", or Isaac Deutscher, who sneered at the "Bogey- cum- scapegoat which Orwell's Nineteen Eighty- Four" had created to frighten the masses. Without the energy to reopen those old feuds, one can confidently say that Orwell looks better today to anyone who had to live "under socialism" than do those who once denounced him for damaging the socialist cause by telling the truth. And every time you open Orwell, there is a flash of illumination, of acute contemporary value. Why is the EU in its present, possibly terminal crisis? Because "India is potentially a nation", Orwell wrote more than 65 years ago, "as Europe, with its smaller population and great racial homogeneity, is not", and all attempts since to make Europe "a nation" have been self- defeating. Why are Americans baffled by the refusal of Iraqis and Afghans to accept the US way as it offers progress and prosperity? In 1940, Orwell wrote: "Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self- sacrifice." So, yes, Orwell does matter, today as much as ever. He once wrote that Anatole France was not really a socialist but a radical, as could be seen quite simply in "his passion for liberty and intellectual honesty". Orwell must have known that he was writing about himself. Come to think of it, Thompson might be right, if for the wrong reason: there could not be a less appropriate site for a statue of Orwell than "the Ministry of Truth" or the BBC, on which the ministry was partly modelled. 2

3 We're living '1984' today By Lewis Beale, Special to CNN updated 9:22 AM EDT, Sat August 3, 2013 STORY HIGHLIGHTS Lewis Beale: We live in age where authorities, companies collect information about us He says after Snowden spying revelations, sales of George Orwell's "1984" spiked He says elements like "doublethink" and "endless war" have parallels today Beale: In a modern surveillance state, we're all suspects Editor's note: Lewis Beale writes about culture and film for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and other publications. (CNN) -- It appears that the police now have a device that can read license plates and check if a car is unregistered, uninsured or stolen. We already know that the National Security Agency can dip into your Facebook page and Google searches. And it seems that almost every store we go into these days wants your home phone number and ZIP code as part of any transaction. So when Edward Snowden -- now cooling his heels in Russia -- revealed the extent to which the NSA is spying on Americans, collecting data on phone calls we make, it's not as if we should have been surprised. We live in a world that George Orwell predicted in "1984." And that realization has caused sales of the 1949, dystopian novel to spike dramatically upward recently -- a 9,000% increase at one point on Amazon.com. Comparisons between Orwell's novel about a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled by the ubiquitous Big Brother and today are, in fact, quite apt. Here are a few of the most obvious ones. Telescreens -- in the novel, nearly all public and private places have large TV screens that broadcast government propaganda, news and approved entertainment. But they are also two-way monitors that spy on citizens' private lives. Today websites like Facebook track our likes and dislikes, and governments and private individuals hack into our computers and find out what they want to know. Then there are the ever-present surveillance cameras that spy on the average person as they go about their daily routine. The endless war -- In Orwell's book, there's a global war that has been going on seemingly forever, and as the book's hero, Winston Smith, realizes, the enemy keeps changing. One week we're at war with Eastasia and buddies with Eurasia. The next week, it's just the opposite. There seems little to distinguish the two adversaries, and they are used primarily to keep the populace of Oceania, where Smith lives, in a constant state of fear, thereby making dissent unthinkable -- or punishable. Today we have the so-called war on terror, with no end in sight, a generalized societal fear, suspension of certain civil liberties, and an ill-defined enemy who could be anywhere, and anything. Doublethink -- Orwell's novel defines this as the act of accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. It was exemplified by some of the key slogans used by the repressive government in the book: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. It has also been particularly useful to the activists who have been hard at work introducing legislation regulating abortion clinics. The claim is that these laws are only to protect women's health, but by forcing clinics to close because of stringent regulations, they are effectively shutting women off not only from abortion, but other health services. Newspeak -- the fictional, stripped down English language, used to limit free thought. OMG, RU serious? That's so FUBAR. LMAO. 3

4 Memory hole -- this is the machine used in the book to alter or disappear incriminating or embarrassing documents. Paper shredders had been invented, but were hardly used when Orwell wrote his book, and the concept of wiping out a hard drive was years in the future. But the memory hole foretold both technologies. Anti-Sex League -- this was an organization set up to take the pleasure out of sex, and to make sure that it was a mechanical function used for procreation only. Organizations that promote abstinence-only sex education, or want to ban artificial birth control, are the modern versions of this. So what's it all mean? In 1984, Winston Smith, after an intense round of "behavior modification" -- read: torture -- learns to love Big Brother, and the harsh world he was born into. Jump forward to today, and it seems we've willingly given up all sorts of freedoms, and much of our right to privacy. Fears of terrorism have a lot to do with this, but dizzying advances in technology, and the ubiquity of social media, play a big part. There are those who say that if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of. But the fact is, when a government agency can monitor everyone's phone calls, we have all become suspects. This is one of the most frightening aspects of our modern society. And even more frightening is the fact that we have gone so far down the road, there is probably no turning back. Unless you spend your life in a wilderness cabin, totally off the grid, there is simply no way the government won't have information about you stored away somewhere. What this means, unfortunately, is that we are all Winston Smith. And Big Brother is the modern surveillance state. Why Orwell's 1984 is still relevant Friday, July 19, Share 44 First aired on The Sunday Edition (30/06/13) After whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a massive surveillance program in which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) could monitor the cellphone and internet activity of U.S. citizens, terms like "Orwellian" and "Big Brother" became ubiquitous in the media and everyday conversation. Sales of 1984, George Orwell's famous dystopian novel, spiked by about 7,000 per cent. But according to a survey by Pew Research Center, the majority of U.S. citizens were okay with this snooping in the name of security. For Michael Shelden, a professor of English at Indiana State University and the author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography, these developments prove that the work and vision of George Orwell are still relevant. He spoke with guest host Kevin Sylvester in a recent interview on The Sunday Edition. When asked about the resurgence of interest in 1984, Shelden suggested "it's because people realize that this problem of 'Big Brother is watching you' is not going to go away." He went on to describe the phrase as "probably one of the most prophetic things said in a novel in the last 100 years. Because we're watching it come true before our eyes." 4

5 Orwell came up with the phrase after working at the BBC, where he got a sense of the broadcasting corporation's huge power "to reach into people's homes through radio waves," Shelden said. Orwell chose the term "Big Brother" in part because he believed that large corporations want to give the impression they're looking out for your interests, but they really want to control you. Shelden likened it to "a big brother's attitude in a family. The big brother wants to look out for you, but he also wants to make sure you do exactly what he tells you." Orwell describes a culture of acquiescence in his novel. Shelden pointed out that the original title of 1984 was The Last Man in Europe, which he likes because it suggests "that the whole fight against this kind of control, tyranny, if you will, will eventually come down to a few last people who will stand up and say 'No.' Or perhaps even just one person who raises the right questions and starts other people to think in the right directions." Shelden pointed out that "a lot had been building up in [Orwell's] mind about how societies function, how they exert their power, especially the British Empire." Orwell had worked as a journalist and had also been a policeman in Burma. "He's one of these writers who can tell you about how power works, and he's seen it at its most brutal level. He's watched executions in his official capacity. So he knows what it means to have the power to take a human life." Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and the Fascists, but he also was at odds with factions on the Republican side. "If I've learned anything from Orwell, it is to keep independence in your heart at all times because whether it's Tory or Liberal, or it's Democratic or Republican, all parties enforce a discipline that ultimately a freethinking person just can't subscribe to," Shelden said. "Orwell said, 'If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' Today, I think on all sides, we're much more intolerant of that kind of dissent." According to Shelden, Orwell wrote 1984 "as a warning. He felt that if someone didn't sound the warning loudly enough, eventually a lot of the freedoms that he cherished would be lost and people would wake up one day and wonder where they had gone." The lesson Shelden draws from the novel is that "if you aren't constantly vigilant about your liberties, on either side of the political spectrum, you'll lose them." Shelden believes that we should be concerned about growing government intrusion in our private lives. "The problem is we don't have an Orwell today, do we? We need someone who can put these issues into stark contrast for us, so that we understand the exact threat that we're under." He went on to suggest if Orwell were around today and raising the alarm, "we probably wouldn't listen to him. But maybe he would say something at some point that others would pick up on and make a kind of rallying cry. It can't just be one person, it has to be a lot of people." 5

6 Teacher Knows if You ve Done the E-Reading By DAVID STREITFELD SAN ANTONIO Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks. They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes or simply not opening the book at all. It s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent, said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business. The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students progress with digital textbooks. Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall. Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, took notice the other day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and so was what CourseSmart calls his engagement index. But Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the student had opened his textbook only once. It was one of those aha moments, said Mr. Guardia, who is tracking 70 students in three classes. Are you really learning if you only open the book the night before the test? I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits. Students do not see their engagement indexes unless a professor shows them, but they know the books are watching them. For a few, merely hearing the number is a shock. Charles Tejeda got a C on the last quiz, but the real revelation that he is struggling was a low CourseSmart index. They caught me, said Mr. Tejeda, 43. He has two jobs and three children, and can study only late at night. Maybe I need to focus more, he said. 6

7 CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing. In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia s, are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind. Eventually, the data will flow back to the publishers, to help prepare new editions. Academic and popular publishers, as well as some authors, have dreamed for years of such feedback to direct sales and editorial efforts more efficiently. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are presumed to be collecting a trove of data from readers, although they decline to say what, if anything, they will do with it. The predigital era, when writers wrote and publishers published without a clue, is seen as an amazingly ignorant time. Before this, the publisher never knew if Chapter 3 was even looked at, said Sean Devine, CourseSmart s chief executive. More than 3.5 million students and educators use CourseSmart textbooks and are already generating reams of data about Chapter 3. Among the colleges experimenting this semester are Clemson, Central Carolina Technical College and Stony Brook University, as well as Texas A&M-San Antonio, a new offshoot. Texas A&M has one of the highest four-year graduation rates in the state, but only half the students make it out in that time. If CourseSmart offers to hook it up to every class, we wouldn t decline, said Dr. Hurley, the dean. At a recent session here of a management training class, Mr. Guardia addressed how to intervene efficiently with underperformers. The students watched a video of a print shop manager chewing out an employee without knowing the circumstances. The moral: The manager needed better data. Then Mr. Guardia discussed with his students the analytics of their own reading, which he had ed to them. The students suggested that once again better information was needed. Several said their score was being minimized because they took notes on paper. Others complained there were software bugs, a response Mr. Guardia has heard before. The student who was cramming at the last minute said, for example, that he had opened the textbook several times, not just 7

8 once. Perhaps these are the digital equivalent of the dog ate my homework. CourseSmart said it knew of no problems with its software. The start-up said its surveys indicated few privacy concerns among students or colleges, and this was borne out by the class. Big Brother, said one student, but that was a joke, and everyone snickered. Being watched is a fundamental part of the world they live in. Amazon has such a footprint on me, said Carol Johnson, 51, who works in the tech industry. It knows more than my mother. Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard s Graduate School of Education, is more apprehensive. He believes analytics are important in the classroom, but they must be based on highquality data. The CourseSmart system has other potential problems; students could easily game the highlighting or note-taking functions. Or a student might improve his score by leaving his textbook open and doing something else. The possibilities of harm are tremendous if teachers are naïve enough to think these scores mean anything for the vast majority of students, Professor Dede said. CourseSmart says the data it collects now is a beginning. We ll ultimately show how the student traverses the book, Mr. Devine said. There s a correlation and causality between engagement and success. There is also correlation, the students are learning, between perception and success. Hillary Torres, a senior, is a good student with a low engagement index, probably because she is taking notes into a computer file not being tracked. This could be a problem; she is a member of the Society for Human Resource Management, whose local chapter is advised by Mr. Guardia. If he looks and sees, Hillary is not really reading as much as I thought, does that give him a negative image of me? she wondered. His opinion really matters. Maybe I need to change my study habits. After two months of using the system, Mr. Guardia is coming to some conclusions of his own. His students generally are scoring well on quizzes and assignments. In the old days, that might have reassured him. But their engagement indexes are low. Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more, Mr. Guardia said. Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought. 8

George Orwell s 1984 WRITING

George Orwell s 1984 WRITING Content Big Brother is watching. What is the discussion of surveillance in George Orwell's 1984 and how was privacy breached? Because of certain actions discovered through