1984 at Hand?

After thinking overnight about the cherry blossom posting I decided the ending wasn't exactly what I wanted, so decided to try to revise it.

My blog host, Blogger. com, has a provision for revising and updating entries. In the past I have made small changes but his time decided to change the complete ending. It was a simple matter of bringing up the post via the "edit" option, making the revisions and hitting the "update" button and suddenly the real world changed.

During last night's midnight reverie, it occurred to me how eerily similar our internet is to Orwell's news outlets in his novel, 1984. A reader of that blog post would not know that the previous ending had been different. In fact, unless someone had printed or made a screenshot of that post, the old ending would be unknowable to almost everyone.

I suppose it's possible the old revisions can be found somewhere in the innards of Blogger and for a law enforcement agency to subpoena (or maybe just ask for) those, but for all intents that old ending is gone.

I know that certain governments control and change the "news" to fit their perceptions of what is useful for their citizens to "know" about the rest of the world, and even what happens inside their own countries. They invariably describe themselves as "democracies" but their definition is different from my definition of how a democracy works.

Many years ago I used to listen to and sometimes read the "news" from Xinua or Pravda. In those days it was pretty obvious propaganda, what with references to "running dogs" and "lapdogs," "imperialist lackeys" and the like thrown around rather indiscriminately. Occasionally, even today I run across articles from those same news agencies. Today they are more sophisticated in their delivery even if their ultimate goals are still the same.

With most of our media on board certain ideological trains, I wonder how much the citizens of our country are subjected to similar news-changing influences by either our government or other powerful forces who subscribe to the concept that they know what's best for our citizens to hear?

Scary stuff to think about and more the reason to support news sources who report the facts as best they can without inserting too much government, personal or corporate bias.