In an earlier draft of 1984 Orwell described the Internet but for some reason he later scratched it out and the passage didn't make it into the finished book.

I was amazed when I discovered this fact in ORWELL'S MANUSCRIPT OF 1984 which is reproduced in the fabulous book THE FACSIMILE OF THE EXTANT MANUSCRIPT OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR which I bought last summer [2003] in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.

Here's the pertinent passage from page 57 of the draft version of 1984 (scanned above) wherein Syme is explaining his Newspeak job to Winston:

"but it'll be a lot smaller before we've finished with it. The Party hopes not to leave any word in existence that's likely to become obsolete before 2050. The great wastage is in verbs and adjectives. My job is the adjectives. Of course you realize that I'm only one of thousands - tens of thousands. Every day I talk over the telescreen with people in Melbourne and Durban and Washington. The whole thing is a miracle of co-ordination. They say that not a single word goes into the Dictionary until Big Brother has passed it personally. He paused to bite hungrily into his bread and cheese but continued almost at once, with a sort of pedant's passion. His think dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and become almost dreamy. "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words..."

The typed portion of the above page came from the second draft of 1984 which was typed by Orwell himself in August 1947. The scratch-outs and inserts in blue ink are Orwell's own handwriting done during the final edit on Jura in 1948. By that time he was very ill and was editing and writing the book in bed.

To see a reproduction of the above excerpt (for those who have trouble reading Orwell's writing) click below to see how Peter Davison has transcribed it in page 74 of THE FACSIMILE:

To read the final version of that passage, as it appeared when 1984 was published in 1949, go to 18.Newspeak and notice that the "talking on the telescreen to Melbourne and Durban and Washington" (which is comparable to communicating on the internet) is no longer there:

"...You think our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. In the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. The great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well...."

My thanks go to the reader who commented that "Orwell did not foresee the spread of information through such things as the Internet" because his email prompted me to bring the "talking on the telescreen" fact to the attention of Orwell Today readers, which proves that Orwell DID foresee the internet. ~ Jackie Jura

COMPUTERS OUR 1984 TELESCREEN (reader John says our internet computers are a telescreen and asks if it's mentioned on the website)

Reader Sarah asks if they REALLY watch us through the TVs and if it's really "eye of Lucifer" on back of dollar bill