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Life Arts    H2'ed 1/13/14

Orwell, Snowden, and Privacy in Light of Ong's Cultural History

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In addition, our Western and American cultural conditioning produced the sense of privacy that forms the backdrop in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the backdrop for Snowden's NSA leaks.

 

But Ong also works with the historical aural-to-visual shift to formulate his account of the contemporary communication media that accentuate sound.

 

In terms of our Western and American cultural conditioning, the communication media that accentuate sound serve as a countervailing force against the communication media in print culture that accentuate sight.

 

As a result, Ong suggests that the communication media that accentuate sound are moving contemporary consciousness in deep new ways, bringing about a slow-moving tectonic shift in our contemporary consciousness.

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

 

So if Ong is correct in suggesting that we are undergoing such a tectonic shift in contemporary consciousness, then we should expect that this shift will shake up and modify our sense of privacy. This is the cultural backdrop we should take into consideration as we discuss Snowden's NSA leaks.

 

It remains for me to situate the concerns many Americans have had about communism, at least from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. In theory, communism is supposedly an economic system.

 

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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