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Ustaris, Johann
Kat King
English 1A
April 4th 2018
Stay Woke: Dystopian warnings through the media

In the ever expanding world of social media and quickening pace in which information is

delivered on the television, radio, internet, and other electronics and media outlets it gets easy to

lose track of warnings of dystopian extremes that sneak by us. In Margaret Atwood’s book, The

Handmaids Tale, she creates a setting of a dystopian world in which warnings were ignored or let

through that lead to the dystopia the character Offred lives in. Offred points out that the shift in

culture wasn’t an immediate surprising enterprise that happened all at once but something that

people gradually let happen until it reached a point they realized as a community they could no

longer publically do anything about. The fear that is growing with modern society is that society

is slowly heading in that direction and that we’ve become desensitized with our cultures and how

the media wants to portray what we view and know. The populace see the warning signs, but

thinks nothing of it until it’s too late. As people of modern society, with our ever growing

responsibilities, it becomes disconcerting when ignorance and apathy from the majority heads in

the direction which leads to a cultural dystopia that, as history shows, is hard to recover from.

This paper will explore elements that in retrospect will hopefully not lead to a dystopia in the

modern day, but will serve as a wake-up call to some to explore what kind of society and culture

they want to create.

In the book, The Handmaids Tale, Offred flashbacks a lot into the past, sometimes giving

insight on how the books world, Gilead, came to be.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death

before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or
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the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they

were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men none of them

were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt

by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being

believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the

dimension of our lives. (Atwood 33)

Offred clearly acknowledges when things started turning for the worse, she didn't think too much

of it as it didn't immediately affect her own life. It was a faraway event that she didn't relate with

until it was too late. Similarly, our society is trying to avoid recent events like this as rising

traction of the Alt-Right Movement in America as well as the Islam-phobia, that is growing

worldwide, are spreading and causing people to doubt each other or take their views to extremes

that the majority can't understand. People are afraid that recent events are slowly spiraling into

events such as in The Handmaids Tale. People all over the world, in current trends, are now are

trying to bring awareness to issues that may one day lead to a dystopia.

In today’s world, the media is starting to get more complicated and the information that

we receive begs us to question its authenticity, in which it is highly recommended to research

any kind of news before you can form an opinion on it. Especially nowadays, with ‘fake news’

coverage popping up around the net and on television and in what we read today, the world is

just getting much harder to interpret and discern truth from fiction. With political parties trying to

sway the masses to their side in every country, by setting up propaganda or censoring news, there

seems to be a war in the media on misinformation and on the freedom of speech around the

world. One such example is in China where they censored the hashtag #metoo on their internet in

an effort to control the masses conversations that don’t align with political parties in power point

of view. Originally a feminist hashtag growing in popularity in China, the government, viewing
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feminism as an intrusion of Western influence, decided it to be censored, “On social media,

phrases like “anti-sexual harassment” have been erased, and online petitions are intermittently

deleted. The use of the “MeToo China” hashtag has also been blocked, forcing members to use

creative homonyms, in order to evade censors.” (Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker) The abuse of

power from world governments and its control over the media sets the stage to a dystopian world

of misinformation.

Much like the real world the world in Atwood’s book is similar to government

censorship we hear about in the media. Offred got so excited to hear any kind of news even if it

was fake because she’s been deprived of any kind of information. “Such as it is: who knows if

any of it is true? It could be old clips; it could be faked. But I watch it anyway, hoping to be able

to read beneath it. Any news, now, is better than none…” (Atwood 47). The world of Gilead has

reached a point where Offred couldn’t even tell if the news was real or not, but at that point any

news was ‘news’. “The anchorman comes on now. His manner is kindly, fatherly; he gazes out at

us from the screen, looking, with his tan and his white hair and candid eyes, wise wrinkles

around them, like everybody's ideal grandfather. What he's telling us, his level smile implies, is

for our own good. Everything will be all right soon. I promise. There will be peace. You must

trust. You must go to sleep, like good children. He tells us what we long to believe. He's very

convincing.” (Atwood 48) This is a prime example of how easily the viewer can be swayed to

believe something the media wants you to believe. Today people are worried that the mainstream

media is being used in such a way, so much that it is thought it should be common practice now

to be wary of any kind of information we receive now.

Thinking closer to home, since the election of Donald Trump, the idea of ‘fake news’ has

gotten more popular with both sides of the political spectrum accusing each other of wrongly

misguiding the masses. Depending where you stand, either with the far-left or the alt-right, each
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pushes their agenda on the media trying to convince everyone that they are in fact the ones in the

right. With this media war going on and its adverse effect on people’s perception of reality there

comes the worry of cultural and political disparity and separation. As people’s cultures is used in

the media for political purposes using controversial topics like racism, sexism, and gay rights to

further a politician’s agenda or social standing. An example from the book is during the . One

such study which was published recently was done in MIT studying the spread of false

information over the social media of Twitter.

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the

span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more

than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By

every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study

finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social

network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.” (Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic)

As popularity with online social apps increase, it becomes more apparent that as users we have

to become more aware of the authenticity of the information we receive. Pulling from the

Atwood's book this is similar to when the initial change from normal society changed to Gilead

society. When the news of terrorist shooting up all the major leaders started spreading everyone

kind of just shutted themselves indoors. Learning things slowly through word of mouth and not

thinking too much about it because they were told something was being done about it by soldiers

. They were pacified by rumors that everything would turn out ok until it was too late.

Lastly, the best country in terms of the closest to a speculated dystopia with the largest

media control would be North Korea. As the only country with a dictatorship mostly closed off

by the world, it’s hard to gain insight into what actually happens in the country. Though

throughout the years, some information has slipped through the cracks, such as their misuse of
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information to manipulate their populace to adore their supreme leader, sometimes in fear of

death. Also, with recent friction with US government over the North Korean Nuclear Crisis,

where North Korea boasts about their ability to create and attack countries within range (namely

the USA) with nukes. As an article in the New York Times in the Times Insider section says,

“North Korea’s opacity makes it seemingly easy to start rumors about what may be taking place

there, as corroboration often seems too difficult to pursue,” Mr. Abrahamian wrote. “Reader

interest in North Korea — and especially in salacious news — is high, making it very hard for

journalists and editors to resist repeating a rumor when they are far from the story and thus less

accountable for it…” (Choe Sang-Hun, The New York Times). Similiar to Atwood's book, though

not directly said, you get the same feel of media control and coercment to what kind of news is to

be shown on the television or in the newspaper. Also another excerpt from the same article,

“And, of course, all of North Korea’s news media is state-controlled, which makes it difficult to

separate fact from propaganda...” (Choe Sang-Hun, The New York Times), shows the troubles

journalist have on reporting about North Korea. Almost like the mini Gilead of the real world,

Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un even has own pleasure squad if rumors are to be believed. Though

his intended use of them is greatly different from the books. (source: Sunny Lee, The National)

One such Defector of the Pleasure Squad, Mi Hyung, gives her one personal testament on rare

information on leader of North Korea’s life. As it is mentioned in the article getting any kind of

factual information on the Supreme Leaders life is so protected that if her account is true then her

life maybe under watch from the North Korean government. She reportedly says she receives

death threats on a daily basis. Also notice her account sounds familiar to the process and training

of the Handmaids in Atwoods book in the Red House. If all this is true, then elements are already

present in the real world even if just heard of in North Korea.

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In conclusion, the elements of dystopia are present both globally and near at home in our

own societies and it is up to the people of the world to discern what course of actions should be

taken as to not end up in an extreme dystopian world such as Gilead. Should we continue to let

media tell us what is true or false in what is going on in the world or rather should us, as the

people all living in one world, have our own responsibility to go out and see and research the

world ourselves and come to with our own conclusive thoughts to what direction everything is

going? With the few examples mentioned out of the many events happening in real-time all over

the world and at home hopefully it raises your own questions and thoughts on what kind of world

you live in. To whether you want to change aspects in society or get you started on concerns

about similarities between Atwood’s book, The Handmaids Tale, and reality. It is only now that

you can start to make your own mark in what direction you think society should go before as it is

mentioned in the book before it is too late.

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Work Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale, 1998.

Fan, Jianyang “China’s #MeToo Moment” The New Yorker, February 1 2018
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chinas-me-too-moment

Meyer, Robinson “The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News” The Atlantic, March 8 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/largest -study-ever-fake-news-mit-twitter/555104/

Sang-Hun, Choe “Rumors, Misinformation and Anonymity: The Challenges of Reporting on North Korea” The New
York Times, September 15 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/insider/reporting-on-north-korea-is-often-risky-and-controversial.html

Lee, Sunny “'Pleasure squad' defector sheds light on life of Kim Jong Il” The National, January 10 2010
https://www.thenational.ae/world/asia/pleasure-squad-defector-sheds-light-on-life-of-kim-jong-il-1.481988