From a philosophical-literary point of view, the novel 1984 written by Orwell can be qualified as an utopia. According to Levitas (1990) in her book The Concept of Utopia;
“Utopia is about how we would live what kind of a world we would live in if we could do just that […] Sometimes Utopia embodies more than an image of what the good life would be and becomes a claim about what it could and should be” (Levitas, 1990)
This can be applied to the theoretical elaborations, designed specifically from a political view, which makes reference to a hypothetical ideal society, generally extended to a sort of abstract future. Peter Davison --within his introduction to the British edition of the novel-- explains that, since Orwell was a child, felt a fascination for this kind of genre –particularly after reading Modern Utopia written by Wells in 1905 – he planned for the distant future to write a book with those amazing characteristics.
Regarding what the teacher said to the class and what I conclude from that discussion, the word Utopia is not the accurate one to the general sense and the content of the novel 1984. The philosopher Ferrater Mora wrote about utopia and states that utopia is a description of a society that it is supposed to impact in all senses.
If we start to think from this point, it is undoubted the fact that the world described by Orwell in his novel 1984 has almost nothing to do with the idea of “perfection”. On the contrary, rather it is in the antipode. The society which the author reflects within his novel is not based in the Rosseauniano principle of “agreement” or “construct”, fund to guarantee freedom to the citizen, but, quite simply, fear. It is a society that seems to be conceived in terms of a grisly nightmare, where even the individual act of thinking is monitored by a technological complex whose ultimate objective seems nothing that absolute control of the citizen:
“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking” (Orwell, 1983)
Throughout reading the novel, some questions came to my mind, for instance, Up to which point we can use the concept of “society” in a collectivity in which its members, full of fear, continually come into question their autonomy as "thinking individuals"? I have some doubts regarding this issue. In regards to the basics of human organization – which, to my mind, is the elemental core of a society concept – in 1984 it is possible to observe a clear involution in terms of formulas and schemas in the modern and contemporary world: the leader –the figure that in political terms it is known as “the sovereign”- is no longer a personalized projection of our collective aspirations, much less representative, but an abstract entity called Big Brother. An entity that has a mission, and that mission can be wrapping up in a single phrase: “Big Brother is watching you”. Orwell does not give hints throughout the novel about this controversial character, nevertheless, while reading the novel in advance the author offers the reader some key concepts about this character.
“Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. […] We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world.” (Orwell, 1983)
The peculiar political system prevailing in Oceania is not, in any case, devoid of what we know as historical purpose, contrariwise, and like the geopolitical that we know as real, it seems to aim at achieving absolute domination or hegemony, both on the "external" level and on the "inside":
“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.” (Orwell, 1983)
What is new for me here is, undoubtedly, the second “end”. And, in the foreseeable reader question -"How to get it?"-, the answer given by Orwell at some moment, is enlightening:
“Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.” (Orwell, 1983)
Some other inquiries come to my mind, for example, is it possible, in a society as the one described by the author, aspire to a minimum portion of “freedom”? From my point of view, certainly, it is not a plausible chance. Above all, if we consider that Oceania and the Big Brother have unique control means, the “Thought Police”, which is gifted of efficiency and its performance worthy of sophisticated technological level of the society at that period of time:
“A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent.” (Orwell, 1983)
The political hegemony achieved in Oceania – even though being incomplete, at least in the “external” level- it establish a novelty in the novel. Never, prior to the time Orwell sets his novel, the technological development has allowed a degree of control of the citizen with the level and depth described in it.
With the telescreen it is possible the exercise of a real power within the consciousness sphere of individuals – something that neither inquisition, for instance, nor the creepiest means of torture practiced along the story had reached completely. Now it can be used the term of absolute power. And the absolute power, embodied by the Big Brother and also the Party, cannot present any fissure, by definition the Big Brother is, from now, the only source of truth:
“Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. […] This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.” (Orwell, 1983)
The alteration of the past is not a simple or trivial commitment. In a political system, as the one described in the novel, it becomes into an overriding activity, what justified the existence of the called “Ministry of truth”, which specific mission is the daily misrepresentation of the past. Under the terms of the novel.
In the society of 1984, the conciliation between a “present” and a “past” in the process of continuous reworking it can be achieved by a mental technique of “reality check”, affordable for any person trained, that in the new society of Oceania language it is named doublethink:
“DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies […] Ultimately it is by means of DOUBLETHINK that the Party has been able--and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years--to arrest the course of history.” (Orwell, 1983)
Definitely, with the doublethink we are talking about a creative method of “immortalize” the present. However, not precisely in the sense of the classical philosophy, the purpose, now, it is just the perpetuation in the power:
“It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.” (Orwell, 1984)
With regards to what is or is not probable about utopias, I was saying that Oceania society, as it has been described by Orwell, seemed to be thought more as a nightmare. Now, it can be added that, within a nightmare, the worst part it is not the content itself, but its plausibility. Moreover, within the universe that Orwell describes in 1984 there is, doubtless, an amount of plausible stuff for the current reader. Perhaps, from this point of view, it can be said that the ideas Orwell predicted through his writing is becoming real.
I would like to point some examples out. On the one hand, in the western part of the world, almost everything that concerns to the concept of the Big Brother has taken an unexpected familiarity in recent years. Much more, from the moment when starting the expansion of a globalized television model, in the core of a program where some unhealthy traits of our contemporary societies are concentrated and exalted: the pleasure for the decadent and unhealthy, the dishonest and free manipulation of feelings and emotions as well.
The overcrowding and sociability as a pragmatic model of attitude and the devaluation in the concept of intimacy, among others. Even worse, outside of the media environment, it is the remote control of the citizen from the State. The possibility –just a possibility- that the state, in any of its derivations or branches, is allow to have access to the citizen’s sphere of privacy -from tracking our bank or email accounts to the control through cameras of all movement or recording our telephone calls- by pressing a key, this is something so much disturbing and discouraging as the experience of the nightmare described by Orwell.
I want to stop here for a minute, since I would like to compare the novel Orwell wrote with the graphic novel of Alan Moore, V for Vendetta. In his work, Moore also places a character that is pure totalitarianism, which is the counselor, while in Orwell’s novel Big Brother is the one who has the entire control of the citizen’s lives. In the comic V for Vendetta, people are not allowed to think differently and that is why they are always been stalked by the government. In other words, their privacy and intimacy are being corrupted. The same happens in Winston’s world, because there are cameras and microphones all over the place and that bans them for being themselves. 
In both stories, the government has control over people’s private lives. However, the stories unfold in a very different way. On one side of the coin, V rebels against the authority and ask other to do the same, all this for his desire of anarchy. On the other side of the coin, Winston does not dare to rebel against Big Brother, in his case, he prefers to write about his experiences.
Since I already presented the problem of control through media, I would like now that you --as a reader-- reflect about an example in which the mass media deceives us and alters our perceptions of reality, both in 1984 and nowadays. I hope the image below can inspire you!
References
Levitas, R. (1990). The Concept of Utopia. Oxford: Die Deutche Nationalbibliothek.
Moore, A. & Lloyd, D. (1988). V for Vendetta. DC Comics.
O'Hagan, T. (1999). Rousseau. New York: Routledge .
Orwell, G. (1983). 1984. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Resch, R. P. (1997). Utopia, Dystopia and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Boundary.
Zabou. (2012). Zabou is watching you. Retrieved from https://zaboujojo.wordpress.com/category/researches/books-articles/ (12.09.2015)
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