Rather comically, part of it has already happened. Newspeak is an everyday phenomenon but we've changed the name. We call it political correctness.
As for Big Brother, we're moving closer and closer to total visibility with the advent of CCTV and the Internet. Foolishly, we reveal far too much of our personal lives -- in text and images -- making ourselves vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. Of course, that's not quite the same as Big Brother but rather Big Cousin.
Big Brother gets into the act with excesses like Britain's GCHQ, America's NSA, and the Russian Federation's ФАПСИ (that's FAPSI to us, but I'm practising my Cyrillic). Ya gotta have at least a little sympathy for Peter Snowden's dilemma -- betrayal vs revelation. I'm glad I never had to make his choice.
I suppose the European Union is also a step in the direction of 1984 where there was a consolidation of the world's nations into a small group of superpowers.
