ns to become cameras, a technological development which has not taken place, overlooking the importance of “what they have actually become, the omnipresent, constant providers of highly colorful visual entertainment for the broad masses.” Secondly, Orwell’s notion of what these telescreens did transmit was the crudest possible sort of propaganda – martial music and endless lists of production figures – which overlooks the utility of entertainment as a form of mass manipulation. In Esslin’s words:There is, after all, not that much difference between a society that floods the masses with cheap, novelettish romance, raucous and sentimental pop music, and pornography to keep them amused and politically inert and one that does the same thing for commercial gain – but with the identical ultimate political result: apathy, ignorance of real issues, and acquiescence in whatever the politicians are doing. And does not commercial television do just that?Furthermore, both Esslin and Irving Howe point out another weakness in Orwell’s depiction of the telescreen when compared to the development that television has actually taken in the latter half of the twentieth century: the proles – fully 85 percent of the population of Oceania – are not required to have telescreens. If the machine-made novels and songs are being put out onto the market in order to keep the masses complacent, wouldn’t the telescreen prove much more effective? Moreover, the proles, kept free of the telescreen’s powers of surveillance, retain the ability to have a private life which Party members have lost. The Party clearly regards the proletariat as not being worth watching, as being unable to develop the “humanity” which must be guarded against in Party members. As it is stated in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism, “What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is lo...
