Big Brother and the Authoritarian
Surveillance State: George Orwell’s 1984
Part 4: Pre-Writing
Is our technology taking us closer to or
farther away from the world of Big Brother?
Activity 35: Considering Your Task and Your Rhetorical
Situation – Surveillance, Authoritarian Practices, and Big
Brother
Current tech that move towards 1984 Current policies/systems to protect us from
1984
Activity 35: Considering
Your Task and Your
Rhetorical Situation –
Surveillance,
Authoritarian Practices,
and Big Brother,
continued…
Of course, all of these technologies have both good and bad applications,
depending on how they are used, who is using them, and for what purpose.
Also, many of these technologies are available to any citizen, not just the
government. If you do a search on Amazon for smoke detectors with built-in
spy cameras, for example, you will get nearly 500 choices, many of them under
$50. If you live in an apartment, you might want to look at the smoke detectors
more carefully.
Before you do any searches, consider the core question “Is our technology
taking us closer to or farther away from the world of Big Brother?” and write a
short paragraph about what you think your answer will be and why.
**hint, this could be the foundation for your thesis or introductory paragraph**
Activity 36: Gathering
Relevant Ideas and
Materials – Researching
the Writing Task
To prepare for this essay, you will start with some Internet searches.
However, if you search on any of the topics listed in Activity 35, you will get
thousands of hits. To get hits more relevant to this topic, you can combine
something from the list with terms such as “government control” or
“government surveillance,” or even “Orwell” or “1984.” For example, if you
search on “facial recognition government control,” you will get titles such as
“The problem of governments using facial recognition software” and
“Microsoft wants regulation of facial recognition technology to limit ‘abuse’.”
If you try combining “facial recognition” with “Orwell” you get things like,
“Facial recognition technology: Is Orwell’s fiction our reality?”
Spend about one hour trying out different searches. Copy/paste links to at
least three sources that look promising.
Helpful research links:
Google Scholar
AllSides | Balanced news via media bias ratings for an unbiased news
perspective
MLA Citations:
MLA Citation Generator (Free) | Works Cited & In-text Citation
Activity 38: Gathering Relevant Ideas and Materials –
Creating an “Annotated Bibliography Card” (Source 1)

Activity 38: Gathering Relevant Ideas and Materials –
Creating an “Annotated Bibliography Card” (Source 2)

Activity 38: Gathering Relevant Ideas and Materials –
Creating an “Annotated Bibliography Card” (Source 3)