David Lyon's qualified and slightly defensive 2003 validation of Nineteen Eighty-Four above foreshadows Benjamin's Goold's somewhat reluctant acceptance in 2004, quoted in the introduction to this study, about the novel's undeniable impact on half a century of popular and academic imagination. A decade after Lyon's observation, John Gilliom and Torin Monahan are more openly dismissive in their comment that:

They have good reason to be sceptical: Facebook did not even exist when Lyon wrote his assessment, nor Google Maps, Twitter, Instagram or the game-changing iPhone, along with other technical inventions and social innovations that have transformed how an exponentially increasing number of Internet users communicate, find information, organise their finances, connect with and perform themselves to their real and virtual ‘friends’. The new reality – that all these activities leave digital traces that are collected, sorted and utilised by countless public and private agencies and corporations – reconfigures notions of identity, privacy, society, threats real and potential in ways that would probably surprise the David Lyon of 2003, let alone the George Orwell of 1949. Certainly they mark out a world very different from that imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Instances such as the Edward Snowden revelations or WikiLeaks disclosures play to more traditional ‘Orwellian’ fears about despotic totalitarian forces at work within and between Western states. Gilliom and Monahan, however (and they are not alone), simply make the reasonable observation that Nineteen Eighty-Four does not really make sense of our world in all its digitised novelty.