Big brother what does it mean. "Big brother is watching you" - who said this phrase
Big Brother is a character famous novel George Orwell "1984", eternal leader of Oceania and the Ingsoc party. After his coming to power, the history of Oceania was completely rewritten, Big Brother became its main actor, the sole leader of the party since pre-revolutionary times. Other significant participants in the events of that time were erased from memory. In the book, Big Brother is portrayed as a black-mustached man, about 45 years old, with a rude but masculine attractive face... The Big Brother's face is depicted in numerous posters posted throughout Oceania. “At each site, the same face looked from the wall. The portrait was made in such a way that wherever you went, your eyes would not let go. The older brother is looking at you - the signature read. " Whether the Big Brother really exists or is he just an image created by propaganda is unknown. The main character, Winston Smith, asks the zealous party member O'Brien: "Does he exist in the sense in which I exist?"
In the book "The 101 Most Influential Non-Existing Personality", Big Brother, who has become a symbol of totalitarianism and government control over a person, took second place.
In 1998, the annual Big Brother Award was established for the most flagrant violation of citizens' freedom by a state or company.
Now "Big Brother" is a common name for a state or organization seeking to establish total surveillance or control over the people. After the book was written, the theory "Big Brother is watching you" appeared, according to which the secret services of all developed countries organized a mechanism for total surveillance of citizens, organizations and other states, including surveillance of Internet users. However, every year we receive more and more new evidence that this is actually happening around us.
Surveillance is carried out on the Internet, using control over cellular communications and any communications, through payments using electronic systems, video surveillance, equipped with face recognition systems, through documenting movement in transport and across borders. Search services are a particularly convenient means for collecting information about Internet users: by asking search queries, the user unwittingly informs the search engine, and through it, the special services and other interested organizations, a lot of information about their interests and preferences, as well as their social circle. Other convenient means of collecting information are Email and instant messengers, as well as browsers and the operating system installed on the user's computer.
Only sophisticated security methods can resist such surveillance, which include the use of cryptography, open source software, and anonymization tools.
You can often hear in the media that there is a certain "Big Brother" and that he is watching you, me, everyone.
Who is this mythical character and why does he collect information about people, especially about those who are real and potential consumers.
How is this notorious big brother watching over you? Who or what exactly is hidden under the name (or pseudonym) "Big Brother" - special services, large corporations, leading states of the world ... or who?
Today, on the site psychological assistance site, you will find out the whole truth about the big brother who is watching everyone and how to avoid this surveillance.
Who is "Big Brother" in reality
Big Brother is a common noun taken from the novel "Big Brother" by George Orwell; this character in the book was the sole leader of the state and the party. Now it is used as a virtual collective image of any serious organization, company, powerful corporation or public service(system), producing total tracking of a person.
Hence the concept (slogan): "Big brother is watching you", as if warning people that we are all in some kind of cap and nothing, up to our thoughts, can be secret and personal.
Some researchers consider the personality cult of Stalin to be the prototype of the big brother. In those pre-war and post-war times of the last century, there really was almost complete (total) control over all citizens of the country in the USSR. Our state had a totalitarian (authoritarian) regime, somewhat similar to the current North Korea.
Why would big brother watch you?
What goals does he pursue, what does he want? The answer is simple - controlling and tracking people, knowing everything about them, down to intimate details, increases the power of power and manipulation of minds (thinking), feelings and desires, and, of course, human behavior.
Complete, absolute and unlimited power is worse than any drug and possession of money and property.
For large companies and corporations, the role of the big brother who watches over you and everyone else is suitable for manipulating the choice of a person as a consumer of the final products produced by these same companies.
Those. if you know everything about you, constantly monitor and control you, then you can unconsciously manage you as customers and users paid services... Those. Big brother can easily substitute for such a commercial concept as "demand creates supply", because your demand, if total surveillance big brother and manipulation of your consciousness and desires will arise from the proposal of the corporation, and not vice versa.
How big brother is watching you
Any society - from a cell of society (family) to a state - that wants unlimited power of a separate small group of people (party, elite of society) - under totalitarianism, or an autocratic leader (under authoritarianism), the establishment (those in power, the ruling circles) - in a democracy, can act in relation to other people (members of society, citizens) as a big brother watching everyone.
And because large companies and corporations are part of this elite of society, the ruling circles, they can also be a big brother who watches over you.
If earlier, for example, in the USSR of the thirties and forties, total control carried out with the help of agent networks, direct and indirect espionage and tracking, as well as citizens recruited as sisotes (secret officer) and a multitude of people living on the principle of equality (everyone should be poor) and envious of those who will live a little better - it was strong snitching and denunciations are developed.
V modern world information, high technologies, the Internet and other means of communication, including satellite, "Big Brother" is watching you almost everywhere - whether you are on the street, at work, at home ... even in your bedroom or toilet ...
In the world of modern gadgets, smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs with the "Smart" system, equipped with microphones and cameras, as well as cellular communication and Internet access, almost every user is a person who is being watched in one way or another by a big brother.
Every Internet user who registers in any virtual services, sites or social networks, or simply visits the pages of sites, without even reporting any data about himself, is constantly monitored by the Internet systems of his big brother.
For example, most sites on the Internet have visitor tracking systems in the form of visit counters (look at the bottom of the page). The site leaves so-called "cookies" in your browser (a piece of information from the visited site), which allows you to track your preferences and in the future show you relevant advertisements of interest or send you mailings.
Tracking counters read and remember your IP address, location (Country, City), from which device you accessed the Internet, including its screen size, browser, operating system, registering your gender, age, your interests as an Internet user.
Those Internet systems, in fact being themselves a big brother in a narrow sense, can share this information with the same advertisers, i.e. corporations, manufacturers of goods and services.
Large companies themselves, such as Apple or Samsung, and other manufacturers of the same gadgets, smartphones, smart TVs and computers can implement the same tracking system from their big brother into the firmware or operating system of the device they sold. It can be built-in or downloaded browsers, instant messengers, and other applications, including social media applications.
And since for many people, the phone and / or computer is almost constantly on, in touch, then the big brother is watching you constantly.
Please note that through your device (smartphone, computer, smart TV, etc.) equipped with a video camera and a microphone, you can be observed both visually and listen to you.
Many experts believe that your big brother does not need your gadget or computer to be on in order to listen to you ... Almost any electrical (electronic) household appliance in your home can act as a microphone - even a vacuum cleaner ... there is an electric motor and a winding with a magnet, and it is from this that an ordinary microphone is made.
Also, do not forget about the ubiquitous credit (debit) cards that store and use information about you and your purchases, for example ...
Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg glues the camera on his laptop - why do you think?
How to Avoid Big Brother Snooping
In order to completely, 100% avoid the surveillance of your big brother, you need to live somewhere in a remote taiga, and even sleep in a cave, not using any by electronic means and the achievements of civilization.
But you can significantly reduce the risk of being filmed by someone with their own laptop or smartphone, or heard during a secret conversation by using the most elementary ways avoidance of presumptive surveillance.
Safety rules when Big Brother is watching you:
- Keep phones in a case that covers the cameras
- Turn off your gadgets when you don't need them and don't keep them in your bedroom at night while you sleep.
- Turn off the TV, even from standby mode, when talking about something secret, personal, or doing something intimate.
- Hold household appliances away from the place of intimate meetings and secret conversations
- Cover the camera and microphone on the laptop (when not in use)
- To make it impossible to track you down by location, it is not enough to turn off the phone - you need to remove the battery and SIM card
- Don't post information online that could be used against you
- Do not conduct frank correspondence and conversations in instant messengers
- Don't leave personal information on unreliable sites
- Clean your browser on your smartphone or computer more often (delete history, cookies, cache ...)
- Do not store very personal or intimate information and pictures in the "cloud"
- Do not click on links in unknown emails, newsletters, promising advertisements
- Remove all unnecessary applications on your smartphone, use passwords and antiviruses, and do not store too much important information(passwords, card numbers, passport data, etc.) without encryption and protection on the phone or computer
By doing these elementary methods personal safety, you will not let your big brother follow you, at least totally ...
Shortly before the 46th birthday of the writer George Orwell, on June 8, 1949, his novel 1984 went on sale in London bookstores. This text has turned the minds of millions of readers. We bring to your attention the material on how one of the greatest novels XX century and who was its creator ...
The first print run of 1984 - 25,500 copies - sold out instantly. By the end of the year, preprints in the UK and US were roughly half a million. Who is this lucky man who literally woke up famous the next day?
Contemporaries left the following portrait of him: “A thin and lanky young man with a huge, erect shock of hair, swaying to the beat of his light, wide steps. With a quiet, disarming smile, which made it clear that you were interesting and funny to him ... I never looked down on myself, did not preach, did not hammer ... no irritation, not a shadow of dogmatic morality. " This is how sages behave, from the heights of experienced knowledge with good irony looking at ordinary people... And George Orwell (1903-1950) was such an artist-thinker. His whole life and work was a path and at the same time an invaluable experience to writing "1984". But the novel really took a long time to write (although, in parallel, another Orwellian bestseller, Animal Farm, was being created). This is evidenced by the search for the name (“ The last man in Europe "," The Living and the Dead "), and five years of work on the text. By the way, the master did not decide on the name and gave the year of completion of the book as the final version, rearranging the last two digits.
George Orwell, or rather Eric Arthur Blair (Orwell is a literary pseudonym), went through a fascination (or rather, a temptation) leftist doctrines. And this is quite natural: the current post-industrial society with powerful and effective social guarantees and equal starting opportunities for people of different strata is not synonymous with the then system with much more pronounced social inequality. Therefore, Blair (or rather, Orwell already) said that "in nine cases out of ten a revolutionary is a climber with a bomb in his pocket."
However, his participation in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans introduced him to the dirty and unjust reality of a socialist utopia. Orwell was seriously injured (the bullet passed a few millimeters from the spine). Became a witness (and almost a victim) of squabbles over the power of the left parties. He fought in the ranks of the Marxist anarchists (POUM movement) on the Catalan front. The latter were accused of treason by the more influential Stalinist communists and destroyed. These events are detailed by Orwell in his memoir "In Memory of Catalonia" (1938).
By the way, at the same time such talented writers and philosophers as Arthur Koestler and André Malraux fought on the side of the Republicans. It was then that Koestler (Orwell's friend), disillusioned with Marxism, began to compose his famous trilogy about "stillborn revolutions" ("Gladiators", "Blinding Darkness", "Arrival and Departure"). And Malraux, in the end, went from being a communist to a Gaullist.
The expression about Big Brother is well known both to fans of social dystopias and not to reading fans in general. Another thing is that they understand the meaning of these words in different ways.
Where did the phrase "Big Brother is watching you" came from?
The phrase "Big Brother is watching you" became famous after the release of the novel by the famous British writer J. Orwell "1984", which continued the theme of "betrayed" revolution, begun in his own work "Animal Farm", which was an allegory on October revolution 1917 and the subsequent development of events in Russia.
An interesting fact. The phrase “Big brother is watching you” was first translated by V. Golyshev in the Russian edition of the book as “The elder brother is watching you”, but such a translation did not take root in oral speech, transforming into a more intense “Big brother is watching you”. The same version was used when dubbing film adaptations of the work (films).
As it sounds in the book by George Orwell
The Big Brother in Orwell's book is the leader of the British Revolution of the 1950s, the founder of the Angsoz party and the ruler of the totalitarian state of Oceania. The image is frighteningly infernal, because none of the ordinary citizens of Oceania even knows (and many do not even think) how real this person is, whether Big Brother really exists or is it just a phantom, a product of propaganda, the personification of the party. Only one thing is known - how it looks; his portraits, painted in such a way that a person, wherever he stands, constantly feels the gaze of the Big Brother, hang on every square in London. The feeling of constant close attention is further intensified by the inscription under the image - "Big Brother is watching you" and by the fact that these words are supported by an extensive network of observers and informers for the timely identification and elimination of dissidents.
It is generally accepted that Orwell chose Stalin as one of the prototypes for the image of Big Brother, a man and ruler whom the writer hated with all his heart, considering him a "traitor to the revolution." It was his features, a black-haired and black-mustache middle-aged man, that were used by the author of "1984" to create a portrait of the ruler of Oceania. However, in his interview with Life magazine, J. Orwell mentioned that when creating the book "he had in mind totalitarianism as such, having specially modeled it in English society to show that no society is immune from such a fate," all the more in view of the generally recognized the fact that the only state that does not look after its citizens is the one that is physically unable to provide appropriate measures.
An interesting fact. In 1998, the American annual "Big Brother Award" was established for the most flagrant violation of citizens' freedom by a state or company, and in 1999, as if in mockery, the first reality show "Big Brother" was launched on Dutch television, in which several people , selected according to the degree of maximum quarrelsomeness with each other, live in a confined space, literally stuffed with CCTV cameras, following the orders of Big Brother, who is watching them around the clock, whose word is law. Adaptations of this show took place in several countries, including Russia.
V modern society the term "Big Brother" is used to refer to totalitarianism, anti-democracy and surveillance.
An interesting fact. J. Orwell owns the authorship of a number of stable expressions and terms, for example, "cold war", "doublethink", "orthodoxy."
“At each site, the same face looked from the wall. The portrait was made in such a way that wherever you went, your eyes would not let go. BIG BROTHER IS LOOKING AT YOU, - read the signature /… / The telescreen worked for reception and transmission. He caught every word if it was not spoken in a very soft whisper; moreover, as long as Winston remained in the field of vision of the cloudy plate, he was not only heard, but also visible. Of course, no one knew whether he was being watched at the moment or not. How often and on what schedule did the Thought Police connect to your cable was anyone's guess. It is possible that everyone was being watched - and around the clock. In any case, they could connect at any time. You had to live - and you lived according to a habit that turned into instinct - with the knowledge that each your word They overhear and watch your every movement until the lights go out. "
George Orwell, 1984.
The Soviet government was afraid of this book by Orwell like the plague - he was very accurate in describing the realities of that life and that government. “1984” was translated and printed in “Tamizdat” - on thin tissue paper, in small print - nonparelia (6 points). They let me read at night. For spreading Orwell, there was a prison term. Then the novel became just good literature and a political anachronism. It seemed that the Ministry of Truth (Central Committee of the CPSU) and the Ministry of Love (KGB) were in the past forever. They began to write Big Brother with a small letter, and the generation of the 90s had to explain for a long time and in detail why the novel of an Englishman was read in the USSR as a native one - written by us and about us.
And now Big Brother returns. I have already returned by the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love. And again it seems that these guys with a hot heart and a steel gaze are crawling out from around every corner: they can - using the road and modern technology- remotely eavesdrop on conversations (more on page 19), read e-mails, bombard unwanted sites with spam attacks, can - if necessary - lower the iron curtain on the window to the global world (page 21) and take control of the free and freedom-loving platforms of electronic social networks
They beat those who disagree with truncheons or lock them up in prisons - just as they shut down the leader of the St. Petersburg Yabloko and organizer of the unification conference of democrats, Maxim Reznik. And Big Brother - oh, immortal Orwell! - meanwhile he listens favorably to the democratic maxims of Reznik's senior colleague, Grigory Yavlinsky. They, as often happened in the past, are again ready to imprison for a word - even for a word said in an online diary - the first trial against a blogger from Syktyvkar, 22-year-old Savva Terentyev, has already begun. Ministry of Love outposts are reopening at universities, and students are asked to report possible sedition in lectures by professors and protest moods among colleagues. And now the Russian Humanities University in Moscow and the European University in St. Petersburg are being closed, and students - organizers of OD-groups, who fought against corruption at the faculty and the squalor of their dean's curricula - are being expelled from the social faculty of Moscow State University. Who, what - will be next? One thing is clear: both "who" and "what" will be. Big Brother is back. Has already returned.