In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Newspeak word prolefeed describes the deliberately superficial entertainment (literature, films, shows, and music) that were produced by Prolesec, a section of the Ministry of Truth, to keep the proletariat content and to attempt to prevent them from becoming too knowledgeable. The ruling Party believe that too much knowledge could motivate the proles to rebel against them. In the novel, Prolesec is described in detail:
The term is used occasionally to describe shallow entertainment in the real world. For example, Charles Spencer, reviewing the Queen musical We Will Rock You for the Daily Telegraph, described it as 'prolefeed at its worst'. Theodore Dalrymple wrote in The Spectator that "France ... is less dominated by mass distraction (known here as popular culture, but in Nineteen Eighty-Four as prolefeed) than Britain is."
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