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Turbulent New World

Summary/Abstract: Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 while George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four between 1945 and 1948. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s anti-utopian novels share many similar features and thanks to their prophecies of the future of society, they are regarded as dystopian novels par excellence. Huxley and Orwell understood the danger and influence of the mass media over people and marked this event in different ways. In Brave New World, the influence of the media over people was so corroding that citizens inadvertently used advertising sentences in their speech. Orwell adopted the "telescreens" and drew attention to their obsessive presence in every citizen’s life in Oceania: there, people were obliged to listen carefully to the instructions coming out of the video. The paper does not only compare the fictional worlds of 1984 and Brave New World, but also deals with consumption as a way of contemporary life and the influence of mass media on the development of consumer mentality. The paper is a verification of the hypothesis that mass media are the creators of utopian and magical reality associated with consumer goods for the purpose of strengthening capitalism and consumer society.

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