Content Extraction
As a constant consumer of content I am too often struck by references that I don’t have a strong command of. My goal with this project is to document all references I come across while consuming content, whether that be through books, articles, journals, papers, talks, lectures, films, etc., find the original work, and create a basic summary of its primary lessons.
The extractions will have a defined format, with the author, publish date, a short summary, and then (most importantly) a list of concepts imparted by the source, including any unique language introduced. Naturally the great works of literature will be a primary focus of this endeavor, as they are constantly referenced in content we consume and are rich with lessons to be learned, but this effort won't be limited classics or even traditional books.
A subsequent phase of the project will be to build some sort of mindmap that links the concepts/references together.
[ Note: As this resource grows I'm going to have a separate page for each content source. ]
1984
Author: George Orwell
Published: 1949
Summary
Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes written 1984), by George Orwell, published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens’ rights.
Concepts
- Big brother looks attractive and ends up being evil
- Watch for political talk that promotes pervasive surveillance
- Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that is almost purely propaganda. It is described in the novel as being “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year”.
- Be extremely weary of giving power to someone who says they’re protecting you.