Sunday, November 9, 2008

George Orwell's Diaries

George Orwell's diaries have been turned into a blog, 70 years after they had been written. Awesomeness. It's going into the blogroll along the side, but I wanted to highlight it here because it is both an innovative use of blogging and because Orwell has become such a looming figure in our own perceptions of the way our world has been formed and the way politics works. It is extremely cool to see a man who cared so much about words having his words come alive, in a way, again.

I would also recommend reading the Newsweek article about him. It was both interesting and informative, and where I found out about the blog.

1 comment:

John said...

Whoever wrote that Newsweek piece has a point: The word "Orwellian" in modern times has come to mean "dystopian + security cameras." The scariest thing about 1984 wasn't the fact that "Big Brother is watching you," it was the fact that the Party in power had systematically eliminated independent thought by changing the English language and removing all words for independent concepts. Orwell's more frightening prediction was the concept of Doublethink, the ability to believe two mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive "truths" which the idealogues of today (on both sides) rely upon to justify their actions.