Review article
https://doi.org/10.5559/di.20.2.13
Turbulent New World
Mauro DUJMOVIĆ
; Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Pula
Abstract
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 while George
Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four between 1945 and 1948.
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s anti-utopian novels
share many similar features and thanks to their prophecies
of the future of society, they are regarded as dystopian
novels par excellence. Huxley and Orwell understood the
danger and influence of the mass media over people and
marked this event in different ways. In Brave New World, the
influence of the media over people was so corroding that
citizens inadvertently used advertising sentences in their
speech. Orwell adopted the "telescreens" and drew attention
to their obsessive presence in every citizen’s life in Oceania:
there, people were obliged to listen carefully to the
instructions coming out of the video. The paper does not
only compare the fictional worlds of 1984 and Brave New
World, but also deals with consumption as a way of
contemporary life and the influence of mass media on the
development of consumer mentality. The paper is a
verification of the hypothesis that mass media are the
creators of utopian and magical reality associated with
consumer goods for the purpose of strengthening capitalism
and consumer society.
Keywords
media; consumption; technology; modern society; technological progress
Hrčak ID:
69570
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2011.
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