[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.
Predictor: Katz, Jon
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Jon Katz ties the vocal media master of Revolutionary War times, Thomas Paine, to the need for activism and similar voices in the age of digital communications. Katz writes: ”Where would Tom Paine go today for some serious rabble-rousing? … Net culture, as it happens, is an even greater medium for individual expression than the pamphlets cranked by hand presses in colonial America. It swarms with the young and the outspoken. Its bulletin boards, conferencing systems, mailing structures, and Web sites are crammed with political organizations, academics, and ordinary citizens posting messages, raising questions, sharing information, offering arguments, changing minds. From thousands of newsgroups to the vast public-opinion forums growing on giant bulletin boards, the Internet would give the old hell raiser’s unhappy spirit a place to rest. Cyberspace, not mainstream media, would be Paine’s home now. Commentary has virtually vanished from TV, and the liveliest newspaper Op-Ed pages are tepid compared to Paine’s tirades. But online, millions of messages centering on the country’s civic discourse are posted daily, in forums teeming with the kind of vigorous democratic debate and discussion that Paine and his fellow pamphleteers had in mind. Gun owners talk to gun haters, people in favor of abortion message people who think abortion is murder, journalists have to explain their stories to readers, and prosecution and defense strategies in the O.J. Simpson trial are thrashed out. If Paine would feel at home there, he would also fight to protect this nascent medium. Learning what had happened to the media he founded as corporations moved in, 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. Media overwhelmed and monopolized by large corporations, inaccessible to individual people and motivated primarily by profit, is the antithesis of Paine’s life, his work, and his vision for the press.”
Biography:Jon Katz was a 1990s technology columnist/journalist who wrote for Wired, Slashdot, HotWired and Rolling Stone. Part of his career was spent as a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe and Washington Post and as a producer for the CBS Morning News. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Journalism/Media
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Age of Paine: Thomas Paine Was One of the First Journalists to Use Media as a Weapon Against the Entrenched Power Structure. He Should be Resurrected as the Moral Father of the Internet. Jon Katz Explains Why
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/paine_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney