Any document of importance, any title or deed, any record of science or business, any poem or book, any newspaper or photograph, can now be replicated any number of times and distributed to any number of people, creating new memories far faster than any Ministry can alter or incinerate them. Every act of communication creates a new memory, if only inside another human skull. Ignorance will collide with the telescreen itself. People will now educate themselves and their children, if they wish to. Heresy can no longer be eradicated by fire.
Heresy is now fire itself, pulses of light in a network of glass.
When men lived as crowded as ants, they quarreled endlessly about who could make noise and who was entitled to quiet, who could watch and who had a right to close his curtains against prying eyes. The telescreen gives man eyes and ears that can see at any distance, so that thoughts and words and gestures can inhabit infinitely spacious parks. It frees his senses and so frees his intellect and his conscious mind. It gives him the power to hear, see, and speak, to be heard and seen, in the company of his own choosing. Now men can create new assemblies, new congregations, new cities whenever they need them, in the capacious light beams of the network and the airwaves of the stratosphere.