Big Brother Is Watching

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Assignment B – Big Brother is watching

In the recent years, there has been an increase in technology which has affected the modern human-being tremendously. Most people cannot even think of a society without some kind of technology. Some inventions have revolutionised the world and others have simply made life a lot smoother. But for some, there are also negative consequences following the development. John Kampfner raises this concern in his article: “Big Brother is watching you more closely than ever: CCTV cameras, the spies in our midst”, where he emphasises the problems with the increasing amount of surveillance cameras. His point with the article is to bring awareness of the situation with CCTV cameras to the general public, so they themselves …show more content…

Kampfner mainly does this by using negatively charged words for example: “…those lily-livered human rights groups.” And “It’s not hard to imagine a Kafkaesque situation…” He uses strong and effect-seeking words that are supposed to exaggerate his point. By calling the human rights groups “lily-livered” he directly tries to undermine them for the purpose of making his own argument seem better. He also does this with irony when he describes the people in the CCTV monitoring station. First, he describes them as decent people, who are merely doing their jobs, but then he adds loaded words when they are describing the system. He writes that they “proudly showed...” the security system and in this way Kampfner ironizes his own statement that they are decent people. MANGLER OVERGANG He uses unformal language to reach his audience, which is the common British person, who is not aware of the general situation. However, he does presume that the reader knows some literature as the threat of Big Brother would not make sense if one is unfamiliar with the novel “1984”. He tries to encourage the reader to take a stand by initiating the text with a question and again in the last sentence of the article. In this way, the reader is left with the question to ponder over even when the text has

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