Invasion of privacy in George Orwell's
1984 extends all the way into a person's
thoughts:
"It
was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or
within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an
unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried
with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear
an improper expression on your face...was itself a punishable offense. There was even a
word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." Book 1, Chapter
5
Privacy, or lack thereof,
is an important issue in this day and age. Social networking, online billpay services,
simple email accounts--these are just a few of the things most Americans, and indeed
people around the world, use daily, in the process of living; whether we wish to or not,
and whether we think about it or not, we are sending volumes of information about
ourselves and our personal lives out into the world with the simple clicking of a
mouse. While we are not--at least in this country--susceptible to police authority for
our expressions, we are certainly visible to people we don't even realize might be
seeing us. Americans are filmed on security cameras hundreds of times each day, whether
we are visiting the bank, grocery store, or the local Quik Trip. Internet access makes
it possible to see who is walking through Times Square in NYC, and numerous other places
around the world, 24 hours a day. So while we don't have "facecrime" per se, our faces
are visible to many more people every minute of every day than we are even aware of most
of the time.
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