Watching Recommendation: Orwell Rolls in his Grave

1 Comment / About Writing, Reading Recommendations / By

I watched Orwell Rolls in his Grave, a documentary made in 2004 about the media.  What curious science fiction writer could ignore that title, right?  The pointer I got to it was from Mark Anderson, of Strategic News Service, who is one of the brighter thoughtful futurists I know.  It turns out that’s is a movie that everyone should see.  A divided argumentative independent media is a critical arm of democracy.  And we’re losing it.  Media is VERY consolidated, and that consolidation in increasingly global.  Diversity in ownership is almost zero.  AOL/Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch own much of both the ways we get our messages and the content of those messages.  If the big telecoms win in the Network Neutrality fight (and we lose the wildness and neutrality of the Internet, which just let me watch a bunch of homemade ads for Obama and earlier let me watch homemade video on Youtube) we will have almost no unapproved messages left. 

How awful.

I want to hear messages people don’t want me to hear.  That’s whay I read science fiction. 

Watch the movie.  Orwell Rolls in His Grave.  By the way, the movie is a little scary, at least as much as information can be scary.  But the creepiest part of watching it for me is that when I talk about things like this movie, I feel like maybe Big Brother is watching somewhere. 

1 thought on “Watching Recommendation: Orwell Rolls in his Grave”

  1. Keylla

    I think you had to be a certain age when Animal House came out to ralely enjoy it. I’m a few years younger than the youth demographic it was aimed at at the time, and I’ve never ralely found it funny. Probably due to the feminization of the culture since then – nowadays, if a boy gets in trouble at school, he isn’t in danger of getting a paddling from the principle so much as he is certain to face the humiliation of “Time Out” in the corner of the room.BTW, along those lines, I have often felt that the movie is the grown-up’s Animal House – almost a sequel to the original Animal House – but a more realistic look at the kinds of lives which are ultimately led by the oddball fellows who never quite fit into mainstream society.

Comments are closed.

newsletter

Sign Up

Scroll to Top