Big brother of the twenty first century: a critical analysis of George Orwell’s 1984 with the movie Snowden and Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma

Abstract

This dissertation looks at Orwell’s 1984, the movie titled Snowden and the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma with an aim to outline the similarity between Orwellian Big Brother and the social media platform that we use today. The main objective of this research is to delineate that the surveillance policy, mainly the algorithm system - used by top tech-giant companies is being utilised as a weapon to control human mind in order to establish power over people all over the world. The purpose is to show that the human psyche has become an object to regulate human actions which ultimately making an individual a prisoner of its own mind. Also, this surveillance system is making human being as commodities in this capitalistic digital world. Likewise, the invisible Big Brother, the networking system to which the entire world is subjugated now by providing personal information of each individual; its constant gaze is inducing human mind through manipulation and destroying the notion of self of every individual by presenting a utopic world in front of it which is ultimately - a dystopia. Though critics have read and claimed 1984 always from authoritarian perspective indicating mainly the political chaos, this research will critically analyse the novel 1984 using Foucault’s panopticon, Gramsci’s hegemony and Freudian psychoanalytic theory which will give an epistemological insight into how the reality of twenty-first century and the upcoming days have been depicted in Orwell’s prescient writing 1984. This thesis shows how the surveillance policy of digital/virtual world acts as Orwellian Big Brother and its grim impact on the psychic condition and behavioural changes of the tech-savvy generation of 21st century.