Utopia or Dystopia? The Giver

Utopia or Dystopia, Where do we live in? 
Watch the video and share your opinions.  What are your predictions for the future?




Utopia was an essay written by Thomas Moor describing and ideal, imaginary island community. This term has been applied since the to concepts such as an ideal and perfect state or community.

According to this, what a utopian society would it be like? Include as many details as possible.


In a DYSTOPIA we have a futuristic, imagined universe, in which we have the illusion of a perfect society.  With dystopias,  writers show their concern about humanity and society. They make criticism about social norms, politics, or some trends. They are like warnings that things can go from bad to worse without anyone realizing.

How would it be a dystopian society like ?  You can consider the following: ​
- CCTV and surveillance​
- Technology
- Robots, machines
- Communities, refugee camps, etc
- Protests and riots​
- Prison, punishments

Can you think of stories (books or films) where we have this type of dystopian society?

Now watch this prezi presentation and check if you were right in your guessings and ideas.





Have a look at the following extract. It is from the novel 1984 by George Orwell.
What's going on? How do you feel about it?Do you see any dystopian element? Think of the characteristics mentioned above and look for some in this excerpt. 
WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MAY HAPPEN NEXT?         Continue the story with your own words.(180 words approx.)

 "​It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the ​glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. ​The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous ​face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. ​Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was ​seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the ​poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the ​caption beneath it ran. ​Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled ​mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the ​telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely ​emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, hisskin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of ​the winter that had just ended. ​Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and tornpaper into spirals, and though the sun ​was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'dface gazed down from every ​commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at ​streetlevelanother poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between ​the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only ​the Thought Police mattered. ​Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilmentof the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and ​transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the ​metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the ​Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they​wanted to. You had to live --did live, from habit that became instinct --in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. ​Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre awaythe Ministry of Truth, his place of work, ​towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste --this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of ​Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Werethere always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century ​houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed ​sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where thebombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid​colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no ​background and mostly unintelligible. ​The Ministry of Truth --Minitrue, in Newspeak --was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, ​soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked outonits white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: ​WAR IS PEACE , ​FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,   ​IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

The Giver by Lois Lowry is a very popular book where you will see some of the aspects discussed before. We have a group of people living an ideal, utopic life. Little by little we learn that all that glitters is not gold...

In the 1-5 Chapters you have to study,  take into account the following:

1. What is the value of having differences? What do you think of the concept of Sameness?
2. Why would a community choose to eliminate differences?
3. Talk about Jonas. How is he depicted in the opening chapters? Does he show any differences with the rest (friends, family, etc)?
4. What do you think about the setting?
5. Describe the community and how it works. Compare it with the world you live in. Who rules the Community? What 's an Olygarchy?
6. Family relationships. What do we learn in the first chapters. Analyse the way they talk, how close they are, etc. What's your opinion about the mum and dad? and about Lily?
7. Friends and social aspects. What do you think of Jonas friends? Has something called your attention?
8. Does anyone show resilience in the book? or at least these first 5 chapters?