Among the Watched

I think that the most notable way in which 1984’s way of life has permeated our own society is in the very potent example of being “watched”. 

The video I’ve just posted is about Facebook’s tracking and targeted advertising system. If you’ve watched it, you may notice that it’s not just Facebook who benefits from this system. Other companies who advertise on Facebook gain information about specific users, and, perhaps even more alarmingly, governmental law enforcement can track users by location and by their specific political associations. I think that we tend to think that our modern day version of 1984 is almost entirely controlled by private companies and big business rather than total government totalitarianism, but evidently, they can work together.

Do you think that one dominates over another? Are we being systemically controlled by the government or private companies? Or is it a combination of both like the video suggests? Or is it neither and our choices are merely suggested to us, while we the people are still in control of our own free will?