J Kendrick wrote:A simple example of just how close George Orwell was to the truth when he wrote that 64 years ago is this new Facebook word "unfriend". It's a classic case of what Orwell had famously called "Newspeak".
To quote Orwell again: "After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not."
The opposite of befriending someone is to spurn... but Mr. Zuckerburg isn't about to put a "spurn" button on Facebook...
... and the book that was written in 1932 was Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
Orwell wrote the book from an english culture perspective. There are words in other languages that don't translate to english in a logical sense. The english language itself is forever going under a change. Read some 15th or 16th century english now, and it makes one ask, how did these people understand each other, but they did, as illiterate as the population was back then... it is more a question of semantics with Orwell. It doesn't matter what cultural background that a person comes from, the basic sense of humanity is there in the average person and each will make some effort to communicate when required.
Many will disagree, but I don't believe Facebook will last. Many have hopes and dreams for it, but like any other `entertainment' outlet, people can turn it off, or ignore it, or someone will create something better and leave the site in cyber dust
As for the cyber spies, it would be rather easy to create plenty of confusion, if many provided mis-information. The biggest problem with storing the information is how it can become obsolete/useless... the expression being `garbage in, garbage out' only compounds it.... try and track someone named Smith or Jones and you come up with millions of them, and that is only from an english name view. The only thing their spying and info accumulation will do, is create more employment for people to analyse the data, and probably come to the wrong conclusions nine times out of 10.