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The Orwellian Vision of Utopia
Abstract
This article comes from the adaptation and updating of a chapter of my doctoral thesis, where I questioned the roles of journalists and artists in the so-called digital societies of the twenty-first century. This research is based on a premise exposed by communications’ theorist Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964), where he defined artists as the “antennae of the race” and as the “early warning systems” of the societies they inhabit (Wolfe, 1968). For this reason, I choose the journalistic and literary work of George Orwell as an example of an artist whose critical mind and sensibility allowed him to see beyond all the dogma and all the propaganda that clouded the reasoning of most of his contemporaries.
Keywords: Utopia, Dystopia, Orwell, Orwellian, Modernism
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