Frank Luntz and the Orwellian Paradigm pays tribute to Frank Luntz for whose work I have a great deal of respect. The term Orwellian paradigm is not critical, merely factual. We are living in the Orwellian age. Since 1984? Of course not. Remember, when George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 he simply inverted 48 and came up with 84. We didn't enter the Orwellian age at any specific time. Indeed, it existed well before Orwell brought it into relief with his novel, stemming from the initial influence of an electronic medium in the earliest days of radio broadcasting. As electronic media proliferated and become more and more sophisticated, their impact grew exponentially. People working in media struggled to master the intricacies. The one thing Orwell proved prophetic about was the ability of power structures to distort language. What he didn't foresee was that in democracies no single entity could take control, that the business of media would be to spawn competition among sundry forces just to reach the public. Actually swaying mass opinion became an art form, perhaps the only true modern art form, and it didn't reduce itself to having the biggest budget. Creativity held the key, precisely the sort possessed by Frank Luntz, who fine-tunes language within a communications grid dominated by visual/aural stimuli and defined by short attention span. I call this process the Orwellian paradigm, a model for generating Mediaspeak, the real world, present-day equivalent of Orwell's Newspeak. We all understand and to an extent speak Mediaspeak, for it is pervasive, imprinted in our collective subconscious.
Frank Luntz and the Orwellian Paradigm differs slightly from my two previous text-based animations (Fuck Off, Christopher Hitchens and Nigger Inside). It is a bit more fluid - a product of updating technologically from a 4 year old Mac G3 to a brand new Mac G5. The G3 limited me in the number of frames I could feed into ImageReady, my animation program. This animation has 367 frames (nearly twice as many as any of the previous animations on Illumination Gallery). It lasts a tad under 40 seconds, then loops. A high-speed Internet connection is required and I recommend using Firefox as your browser.