From its release in 1949 through the end of the Cold War, George Orwell’s 1984 was a fixture on high school reading lists in many Western nations. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, was familiar to students as the man who fought against but ultimately succumbed to Big Brother and the totalitarian regime that ruled the London of Orwell’s future.

1984 certainly made an impact on Ben Elton, whose Blind Faith is a re-imagining of Orwell’s universe updated for the Internet Age. Elton, an accomplished television and stage comic, novelist, and satirist, makes little attempt to disguise his hero, Trafford Sewell, as anything other than his own Winston Smith.

Blind Faith is set in the year 56 ATF (“After the Flood” - in Elton’s future, much of the Earth’s inhabitable landmass is underwater thanks to global warming). The over-consumption of reality TV, a pervasive Internet, and fast food has turned overcrowded London into a mass of overweight, sweating, near-naked humanity. Just as in 1984, two-way video screens are standard issue in every residence, but they’re not viewed as an intrusion.

Rather, they’re just one of the tools used by a voyeuristic society whose main pastime is looking at each other from (literally) cradle to grave, as everything from births to parties to dinner conversations - but most of all (in a reversal of 1984) sexual encounters - is filmed for consumption online. Sewell and his fellow citizens spend all of their free time using familiar online tools that have evolved:

• They constantly check out each others’ Face Space pages and update their own.
• They ‘Goog the World Tube’ for information on their neighbors and co-workers.
• They ‘Perv the Net’ for footage of each others’ spouses.

All of this happens at the direction of a theocracy known as The High Council of the Temple, which mandates that all experiences must be shared, both privacy and fiction are outlawed, and Muslims and Jews are criminals by virtue of their faith. In this London, citizens are forced to worship The Love: a Holy Trinity of God, his only son Jesus, and Princess Diana. The Love is one of just countless ways that Elton sees today’s societal obsession with everything from body image to celebrity gossip manifesting itself not as entertainment but a way of life.

This is all, of course, absurd, which is Elton’s intention. The reader gets hit over the head with his grim, crude vision of the future, even more so than when watching Idiocracy*, Mike Judge’s underrated movie that carries the same warning: reality TV, unquestioning religious devotion, and a fixation on celebrities will doom society. Though at times hilarious, it takes a while to get used to, and squeamish readers may not enjoy the more graphic depictions of what constitutes entertainment in the year 56 ATF.

That said, there’s a very interesting plot at Blind Faith’s heart. It begins with Sewell being chastised by his local priest for failing to put video of his daughter’s birth online fast enough, and we’re treated to the slowly unfolding but fascinating story of Sewell’s antisocial desire for privacy. A colleague at NatDat (National Data Bank - Elton’s tribute to 1984 is replete with its own form of abbreviated speech) reveals himself as a Vaccinator, an outlawed profession that seeks to reduce the skyrocketing infant mortality rate of the future.

When Sewell consents to the vaccination of his daughter to prevent her from joining the 50+% of newborn children who die before their first birthday, he sets in motion a rollercoaster sequence of events that begins with his discovery of an underground group that has preserved history’s great works of fiction and ends as he sets off a revolution. It’s a quite intriguing and at times very funny ride, and along the way it’s easy to get engrossed even while being forced to question which elements of today’s entertainment were perverted to become part of tomorrow’s totalitarian regime.

Blind Faith is not for everyone. It requires not just tolerance of a shameless appropriation of unfailing tribute to 1984’s plot, but also a certain lack of faith in the certainty of humanity’s ability to reverse what Elton believes is an inevitable societal slide into ignorance. However, if you have a bit of a cynical streak, a keen interest in the way that technology shapes society, an interest in alternative histories - and most of all a sense of humor - I strongly recommend it. Something tells me that this novel will be a hit amongst those who follow technology, and particularly social media, closely.

BTW, if you’re here in the US, you will have to jump through a few hoops to get a copy right away, as it’s not slated for domestic release until next month. I had to buy my copy on eBay from someone in Australia, but the extra few dollars in shipping were well worth it. If you want to get a taste for yourself without resorting to international e-commerce, you can read the book’s opening passage here.

*If you haven’t seen Idiocracy, run don’t walk over to Netflix and make sure your copy is on the way. Stat.

P.S. If you’ve made it this far into a longish review, you’re probably an avid reader. If that’s the case, check out Titlepage. [Thanks Mashable]

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Penguin, 2006, 324 pages

The advent of social media has introduced an era of collaborative communications that raises many questions. Are corporate blogs necessary to influence consumer buying decisions? Can low-cost viral marketing campaigns outpace traditional media buying? How influential, accurate and necessary have resources like Wikipedia become in an increasingly connected world?

Researchers Don Tapscott, head of the management consultancy New Paradigm, along with colleague Anthony D. Williams, leveraged $9 million in research to answer these questions with Wikinomics, a book whose focus is as broad and ambitious as Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Just as Friedman made compelling arguments for a flattening of the business world marked by the globalization of marketing, production and delivery of everything from iPods to executive assistance, Tapscott and Williams establish the influence of collaboration on an unprecedented scale in the development of everything from aircraft design to encyclopedias to open source software.

Wikinomics is built around four central ideas: openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. These ideas are woven throughout the book in the context of economic theory, American history, boardrooms and newsrooms. Some of the book’s concepts aren’t entirely new—many of us collaborate all the time with colleagues, customers and partners on materials like PowerPoint presentations, press releases, business plans, and the like. But Wikinomics does introduce some bold new concepts. According to the authors, Web sites have become passé. They argue that in order to thrive, communicators must instead build thriving online communities. The merits of new media platforms such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, chat rooms, podcasting and more are discussed at length. “Peer production”—harnessing the creative energy of massive amounts of people—is emphasized as the key to an ever-evolving communications revolution.

The authors meticulously document how Google, MySpace, Second Life and YouTube have changed the way we communicate and collaborate in both professional and personal settings. The stories of “The Peer Pioneers” are fascinating, most notably the story of Wikipedia’s five-year evolution from a pet project to a resource used by more than a third of online Americans. The discussion of “Prosumers” and the “democratization of media” shed light on the ways that consumers of news are changing the way that news is reported, sometimes to the extent that we are creating it ourselves.

The final chapter consists of one sentence inviting the reader to “edit this book!” by visiting a wiki called the Wikinomics Playbook. It includes real-time updates reflecting new communication media that have emerged since the book was published, as well as other insights offered by dozens of contributors worldwide. In addition, readers are invited to edit the online version of the book itself.

In the end, that’s what makes slogging through Wikinomics’ drier portions worthwhile. Armed with the authors’ understanding of how wikinomics is changing the world of collaboration, we ourselves are left to collaborate with them.