I loved this when I first read it in high school, mostly because it mocked academic english for relying on pretentious jargon to obfuscate itself.<p>My second reading years later, the whole thing felt very pretentious itself, if not downright authoritarian. Orwell acknowledges at the beginning that his view might seem like "sentimental archaism", but properly enforced, archaism isn't just sentimental, it's oppressive. Wanting things to remain the same, or revert to the way they were before is, after all, a serious condemnation of everyone fighting for progress along the way.<p>Reading it a third time today, and reading it as a tech worker, I'm drawn to his note that "effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form" as it relates to technologies as new mediums for communication. For Twitter to establish 140 characters as the length of a tweet is also to establish it as the length of a though, which in time makes tweeting the perfect way to broadcast thoughts.<p>I don't want to sound too conspiratorial here, I don't think any given medium is bad. I also don't want to sound too inane and suggest that the only important take way is the basic idea of McLuhan's Medium-as-Message.<p>I do think it's useful to think of the battle of dominance in medium as a battle for dominance in message, and accept that victory may be as self-perpetuating as it is self-normalizing.<p>EDIT: You might also enjoy DFW's related essay: <a href="http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...</a>