Orwell underestimated the extent to which individuals could be subverted and moulded rather than just simply imposed upon. The new digital technologies can be uised for heightened direct control of an individual's access to information and an enhanced ability for authority to supervise and observe 'deviant' behavior. They potentially, if control is centralised, be used to manage both current news and recorded historiory.
Yet at the same time the ability to indulge in 'pirate transfers' of files and data in easily hidden, transmitted, and transported forms ... ranging from CDs, the Internet itself (even if in a doded form_, to flash memory and various hard disks are decisively sabotaging the ability of authority to control the storage and distribution of 'subversive' (perhaps accurate) information.
In the Orwellian world of the future there was no hope for purveyors of subversive information. Today the balance may be swaying but the ability of the individual to store and transmit huge quantities of data with his own private resources weighs largely in favor of a more open society prevailing.
Each individual is potentially an uncontrolled data node. The ease of recording the present and transmitting it to the future for comparison makes much of the news management of '1984' implausible or impossible.
Digital communications may yet prove able to assist those who wish to save us from our own worst authoritarian/Orwellian tendencies.
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