Larry,
Being a Canadian, I had to webucate myself on Thomas Paine to understand your comment. Here is part of an article from wired.com that I found on what he would be like in our world.
The Age of Paine
wwww.wired.com
Thanks for the education
John
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<< It's easy to imagine Paine as a citizen of the new culture, issuing his fervent harangues from www . commonsense . com. He would be a cyber hell raiser, a net.fiend.
Picture him logging on from the small brown wooden cottage still standing on his New Rochelle farm - the one given him by New York State in appreciation of his services during the Revolutionary War. He would get up late, as always, breakfast on his customary tea, milk, and fruit. The six chairs downstairs would be piled high with pamphlets, magazines, printouts, discs, letters, papers, tracts, and research.
Technologically challenged, Paine would have an older Macintosh he'd be loathe to replace. A friend would have given him the screen saver with the flying toasters, which he would scoff at as frivolous but love dearly. Friends, surely, would also have given him a PowerBook to write on when he had to retreat to his sick bed.
He might belong to contentious conferencing systems like The Well or Echo, but he would especially love cruising the more populist big boards - Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online. He would check into Time Online's message boards and tear into Republicans and Democrats daily. He would e-mail the New England Journal of Medicine his tracts on the spread of disease, and pepper Scientific American's home page with his ideas about bridges.
He would bombard Congress and the White House Internet site with proposals, reforms, and legislative initiatives, tackling the most explosive subjects head-on, enraging - at one time or another - everybody.
The Net would help enormously in his various campaigns, allowing him to call up research papers, download his latest tract, fire off hundreds of angry posts, and receive hundreds of replies.
They would hear from him soon enough in China and Iran, Croatia and Rwanda. He would not be happy to find a Royal Family still reigning in England, but he would be relieved to see George III's heirs reduced to tabloid fodder. And he'd delight in seeing France a republic after all. He would emit nuclear flames from time to time, their recipients emerging singed and sooty. He would not use smileys. He would be flamed incessantly in turn.
He would be spared the excruciating loneliness he faced in later life on that modest farm, where neighbors shunned him, where visitors rarely came, and where he pored over newspapers for any news of his former friends' lives. No longer an outcast, thanks to the Net, he would find at least as many kindred spirits as adversaries; his cyber mailbox would be eternally full.
It is here, perhaps, that the gap between Paine's tradition and modern journalism seems the most poignant and stark. Journalism no longer seems to function as a community. Since it no longer shares a definable value system - a sense of outsiderness, a commitment to truth-telling, an inspiring ethical structure - journalists seem increasingly disconnected from one another as well as from the public.
Online, feuds rage and people storm at one another, but the vast digital news and information world contains many distinct communities. On bulletin boards and conferencing systems, there is already a moving and richly documented tradition of rushing to one another's assistance, of viewing oneself as part of a collective culture. In America's media capitals - New York, Washington, and LA - there seems to be no such sense of common ground.
Paine in particular might not find much friendship from other journalists. He would hate Manhattan media movers and shun them like the plague.
Paine would greatly prefer the chat room to the cocktail party. His notions of spare, direct writing would work beautifully on the Net, permitting him productivity and an audience even after his gout made traveling difficult. He would find himself, in fact, embarking on his greatest dream, to become a member of a "universal society, whose mind rises above the atmosphere of local thoughts and considers mankind, of whatever nation or profession they may be, as the work of one Creator."
Life might be easier for him, but it would not be easy. Intense personal relationships would still elude him, but he seems a good candidate for one of those online romances that flourish all across cyberspace. Like some of his Net successors, his social skills were not substantial. He would still be reclusive and moody, too offensive to have dinner with Bill and Hillary, too combative to be lionized by academia, and too ornery to get hired by major media outlets. He would probably find most of today's newspapers unbearably bland and write angry letters to editors canceling his subscriptions.
He and the massing corporate entities drooling over the Net would be instantly and ferociously at war as he recognized Time Warner, TCI, the Baby Bells, and Viacom as different incarnations of the same elements that scarfed up the press and homogenized it. He'd have lots to say about the so-called information highway and the government's alleged role in shaping it. One of his pamphlets - this may be the only thing he'd have in common with Newt Gingrich - would surely propose means of getting more computers and modems into the hands of people who can't afford them.
Instead of dying alone and in agony, Paine would spend his last days sending poignant e-mail all over the world from his deathbed via his PowerBook, arranging for his digital wake. He'd call for more humane treatment for the dying. He'd journal online about the shortcomings of medicine and the mystical experience of aging, while digging into his inexhaustible supply of prescriptions for the incalculable injustices that still afflict the world. >>
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