Polarizing Media From 1984's Party… and Social Media
essay | exploring the roots + consequences of inflammatory speech
Before we get into it, a few notes:
I’m not going to lie to you, this was written about a year ago for my English class. I stumbled upon it while organizing my Google Drive and (despite the cringy writing) felt there were some interesting takes worth sharing. If you haven’t read the book 1984 before, half of the analysis won’t make any sense — but you’re welcome to read it regardless :)
Content warnings: mentions guns, the January 6th United States Capitol attack
At first glance, the warnings in George Orwell’s totalitarian world of 1984 seem pretty clear-cut. Surveillance kills privacy, don’t restrict language and speech, be careful about fake news — the usual. Served on a silver platter and reminding the reader that we should never, ever let ideologies from the Soviet Union take over, lest we risk bringing rise to our own Big Brother. But in post-Red Scare America, where anti-communism continues to run rampant and anything reminiscent of the Soviet Union is frowned upon by the general public, such lessons seemed a bit outdated to readers like myself. We’re living in the 21st century — if anything, the internet and its digital age are democratizing information! Really, our reality is fine, there’s nothing that Oceania’s spoon-fed media could possibly warn us about our own mediums of information.
Yeah…no. Sorry.
As a student who (unwillingly) read 1984, I ended up walking away from this 7-decades-old classic having learned just how malleable media is — or more importantly, how this allows it to be weaponized. Why else would the Party go out of its way to replace truths with lies, strip language of its meaning, and bother to surveil its citizens’ behavior to the degree where they can predict their actions? Because by maneuvering the media reaching our so-called “hero”, Winston, and the citizens of Oceania alike, they were able to extremize their reactions for their benefit. When left unchecked, these reactions produce radicalized thoughts that lead to extreme repercussions as individuals felt targeted by the content and in turn found “someone” — anyone, really— to turn against in defense.
This is exactly the kind of result a totalitarian government (or politicians and businessmen…) would want their supporters and audience to have against their supposed enemies.
At the beginning of the novel, Winston recalls a morning at his workplace where he attended the Two Minute Hate along with his colleagues. The televised Hate they viewed was composed of several emotion-heightening elements, including a “maddening bleating voice”, a Eurasian soldier that seemed to “spring out of the surface of the screen”, and venomous language “plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling”. On top of being just downright unpleasant to watch, this media posed the Party’s enemies as a threat: exaggerating their worst in order to essentially poke the audience with a stick. And it worked, too — after being exposed, they become crazed and overwhelmed with emotion as a “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill” flowed through the group, “turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”
While we’re not mandated to absorb propaganda aiming to turn us into murderous minions, every day we log onto apps like Twitter where self-proclaimed advocates and politicians alike update us on the newest atrocities we should be protesting. And chances are, you do end up having a similar feeling of alarm, since the content you receive just happens to tie into your tastes, beliefs, and most important of all, your identity. Why? Because instead of the Party altering the media to target individual fear, we have social media algorithms doing it for us.
Here’s the thing — every time you like a picture, linger a few seconds longer on a video clip, or share a post, that information is tracked and stored by the app. Using this data, social media algorithms create a “profile” of who you are and are able to predict what content would spark the strongest reaction from you. Likewise, O’Brien had deduced Winston’s greatest fear of rats by surveilling his everyday life, and ended up using the information to scare Winston into doing “what is required” of him. In our case, social media platforms and broadcasting companies want us to be appalled — it’s much more profitable than “boring” news. As Christopher Mims explains in his article for the Wall Street Journal,
An old newspaper catchphrase was, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ [...] when Facebook supplies us with a disproportionate amount of our daily news, a more-appropriate catchphrase would be, ‘If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious.’
And as we continuously see in social media, the most contagious outrage of all is what’s produced in defense of one’s identity. As such, media is quickly polarized as information is divided into two opposing “sides” — either it supports the user’s beliefs and identity, or attacks it. And as Ezra Klein wrote for Vox,
outrage is deeply connected to identity — we are outraged when members of other groups threaten our group [...] As such, polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences; it doesn’t focus on the best of the other side, it threatens you with the worst.
And because we as humans are more attentive to threats as part of our survival instincts, we turn against people if we simply view them as threats.
Whether that form of outrage is derived from propaganda like “the Hate” or an upsetting Tweet, it can make you feel like you’re being put on the spot. You know that you and who you are is being “pointed” at and shone under a dangerous spotlight, and the feeling of alarm wants to lead you to something you can in turn point your own rage to.
During Hate Week, Winston observes a similar reaction to the accusatory media of the Party, noting that
From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. [...] The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.
As intended by the Party’s manipulations of the media, the looming threat of danger in the threatening behavior of having a poster of the enemy seemingly pointing a gun at you at all times directly targets individuals. Such distinct danger and sense of fear “whipped” the public into an uncontrolled frenzy of anger and extremity justified by nationalism.
With the source of danger “pointed straight at you” in the media, public individuals are singled out and intimidated into picking a side. The danger is staring straight at them, they have to run in either direction. In doing so, they are pitted against “others” different from them, whether that be the Eurasians or the unorthodox. Turned against each other, people are divided into extreme sides of the spectrum of political beliefs (and controversial ideas in general). This in turn leads to “frenzies” as people struggle to express those heightened emotions and choose to act upon them instead.
Subjective media designed to enrage the public against a group different from them, leading to rash actions with dire consequences — now, where have we heard this story before?
On January 6, 2021, the same type of rage caused by Hate Week was shown in response to the results of the 2020 presidential election. As discussed by Paul Barrett in his article for The Brookings Institution, after seeing
political content on social media that does tend to make them more upset, more angry at the other side [and more likely] to have stronger views,
Trump supporters reacted by lashing out in a “frenzy of patriotism” that we now remember as the attempted insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Similar to how the media intensified the rageful actions during Hate Week, repetition of media that made people feel threatened by “others” (who, in this case, are the Democrats that supposedly committed voter fraud against Republicans) put them on the defensive, leading to rageful acts such as the insurrection. This was the result of social media posts that targeted warped information toward vulnerable groups, who then felt like their constitutional rights were being threatened and took extreme measures in the name of what they viewed as patriotism. Although media itself serves to amplify information, this can easily lead to extremities as thoughts are quickly radicalized.
Clearly, propaganda is a tale as old as time. While the media in 1984 was tainted with alterations by the Party in order (and specifically directed) to spark hatred, the internet gives us access to all the media we could want. Yet, our daily stream of media remains biased. In the modern-day, social media algorithms worsen this amplification of information as it regurgitates the same provoking content. This repetition of the same ideologies and beliefs then isolate people in “thought bubbles” that intensify specific thoughts, blurring them with powerful emotions. When they become overpowering, people feel prompted to selfishly fend for themselves, losing their rational humanity when threatened and lashing out in response.
By leaving social media platforms unregulated, we allow them to continue targeting individuals and polarizing everything from the news to political issues. Unless we as a society fully recognize the danger of the human reactions to subjective media, the violent acts of rage from Oceania will continue to echo in our world and lead us toward an Orwellian society.