Students reading Brave New World today frequently draw an immediate, sometimes shallow, comparison between the novel's feelies and soma and their own experience with social media and smartphones. This instinct is worth encouraging, since it shows genuine engagement with the text's relevance, but it needs to be shaped into a more precise argument than "social media is our soma."

A useful distinction to introduce is that the World State's distractions are centrally designed and imposed by a single governing authority, while social media platforms are commercially designed by competing companies, each optimizing for engagement rather than social stability specifically. This difference matters for any essay arguing the comparison seriously, since it changes who benefits and why.

A stronger essay prompt might ask students to argue whether the absence of centralized intent makes social media's effects more or less concerning than the World State's deliberate engineering, since an unintended consequence of profit-driven design could, in theory, be harder to correct than a single state policy.

Another productive angle examines algorithmic personalization as a modern parallel to hypnopaedia, since both systems shape preference and attention without the subject's full awareness of how or why. Asking students to research how recommendation algorithms function gives this comparison a factual foundation rather than relying on vague impressions of "the algorithm."

Essay Prompts on Social Media and the World State

These prompts require students to move past a surface-level comparison and engage with the specific mechanisms of both the novel and contemporary technology.

• Argue whether the decentralized, profit-driven design of social media makes its effects more or less dangerous than the World State's centralized control
• Compare algorithmic content recommendation to hypnopaedia as tools that shape preference without full awareness
• Analyze whether the World State's citizens are meaningfully different from heavy social media users in their capacity for genuine reflection
• Argue whether a modern equivalent of soma already exists in current technology, and defend the comparison with specific evidence
• Discuss whether Huxley's warning is more relevant to social media than to any single government policy today

Keeping the Comparison Text-Grounded

The biggest risk with this kind of prompt is students writing an essay that is mostly personal opinion about social media with only a thin connection to the novel. Requiring students to cite at least three specific moments from the text, not just general references to soma or the feelies, keeps the essay anchored in close reading rather than becoming a general opinion piece.

It also helps to require a specific, named platform or technology as the point of comparison, rather than a vague reference to "social media" in general, since specificity produces stronger, more defensible arguments and prevents students from making overly broad claims that are difficult to support.

Grading This Contemporary Comparison

Because this prompt invites strong personal opinions, grading needs to focus on argument quality and evidentiary support rather than whether the teacher agrees with the student's take on social media. A rubric emphasizing textual grounding and logical reasoning, rather than the conclusion reached, keeps grading fair across a range of student perspectives on a genuinely contested topic.

This kind of essay can also surface strong, sometimes unexpected arguments from students who are otherwise less engaged with traditional literary analysis, since the contemporary relevance gives them a personal stake in the argument that a purely historical or abstract prompt might not.

Using the Comparison to Deepen Engagement

Beyond the essay itself, this comparison tends to reignite student interest in the novel's earlier, slower chapters, since students who see the relevance of the ending's themes often want to revisit earlier passages about conditioning and consumption with fresh eyes. Building in time to briefly revisit those chapters after this discussion can deepen the final essay's analysis.

Whatever specific platform or technology students choose to compare, the underlying goal is helping them see that Huxley's warning about engineered distraction did not require him to predict smartphones specifically, only to understand a pattern that keeps repeating in new forms.