Topic: Getting

[Thomas Paine] 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.

[Cyberspace] would be Paine’s home now … If Paine would feel at home there, he would also fight to protect this nascent medium … He would spot commercialization as Danger Number One. He believed in a press that was not monopolistic but filled, as it was in his time, with individual voices; one that was cheap, accessible, fiercely outspoken. He believed that media like the Net – many citizens talking to many other citizens – were essential to free government. He was right: journalism’s exclusion of outside voices and fear of publishing any but moderate opinions has made it difficult for the country to come to grips with some of its most sensitive issues – race, gender, and violence.

Today’s media are what the Net should never become – but will surely evolve into if it fails to develop, articulate, fight fiercely for, and maintain a value system other than expanded memory, whiz-bang toys, and money. The digital age is young, ascending, diverse, already nearly as arrogant, and, in parts, as greedy as the mass media it is supplanting. The new generation faces enormous danger from government, from corporations that control the traditional media, from commercialization, and from its own chaotic growth. Thomas Paine is a guide, the conscience that can prompt new media to remember the past chiefly in order not to repeat it.

The new media (computers, cable, and the Internet) can and should adopt him … [Thomas] Paine does have a legacy, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, and the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another. Tom Paine’s ideas, the example he set of free expression, the sacrifices he made to preserve the integrity of his work, are being resuscitated by means that hadn’t existed or been imagined in his day.