"Orwell's Legacy"

John O'Connell of The National, in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of 1984, examines the book's influence on British and American society and media, the story behind its creation, and the book's role within George Orwell's broader, more diverse corpus of essays and nonfiction.

Orwell never intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as an explicit prophecy. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” he wrote, “but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive.”

So has it? Certainly, Britain has a culture of surveillance – CCTV, mobile phones and of course the internet, which despite its seemingly limitless freedoms is really a gigantic spying machine. Social networking is sounding the death knell of privacy. (In the book, two-way telescreens have been installed in the homes of every Party member and in every public place. They blast out propaganda but also monitor their viewers as they go about their business.) Newspeak’s cloudy legacy pollutes the media, although the linguistic contraction that Winston’s colleague Syme, editor of the official Newspeak dictionary, anticipates when he observes that “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words” hasn’t really happened. On the contrary, language, particularly corporate and military language, has expanded in an evil blossoming of vagueness and euphemism.