A Page of Paine The Age of Paine, He should be resurrected as the moral father of the Internet by Jon Katz Thomas Paine, professional revolutionary, was one of the first to use media as a powerful weapon against an entrenched array of monarchies, feudal lords, dictators, and repressive social structures. He invented contemporary political journalism, creating almost by himself a mass reading-public aware for the first time of its right to encounter controversial opinions and to participate in politics. 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 - via the blinking cursors, clacking keyboards, hissing modems, bits and bytes of another revolution, the digital one. The Net offers what Paine and his revoutionary colleagues hoped for - a vast, diverse, passionate, global means of transmitting ideas and opening minds. That was part of the political transformation he envisioned when he wrote, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Through media, he believed, "we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used." Paine called for a "universal society," one whose citizens transcend their narrow interests and consider humankind as one entity. "My country is the world," he wrote. The Internet has, in fact, redefined citizenship as well as communications. It is the first worldwide medium in which people can communicate so directly, so quickly, so personally and so reliably. In which they can form distant but diverse and cohesive communities, send, receive, and store vast amounts of textual and graphic information, skip without paperwork or permission across borders. Where computers are plentiful, digital communications are nearly uncensorable. This reality gives our moral and media guardians fits; they still tend to portray the computer culture as an out-of-control menace harboring perverts, hackers, pornographers, and thieves. But Paine would have known better. The political, economic, and social implications of an interconnected global medium are enormous, making plausible Paine's belief in the "universal citizen." He would recognize its style and language, too. Paine believed that journalists should write in a short, spare, unadorned language that everyone could understand. He was the first modern political writer to experiment with the art of writing democratically and for democratic ends, writes John Keane in Tom Paine: A Political Life (the newest and perhaps best of the Paine biographies). Paine hammered out his own colloquial style that eschewed "purple passages, sentences without meaning, and general humbug" because he considered it the highest duty of political writers to irritate their country's government. Excerpt with permission from Wired magazine, May 1995, "The Age of Paine" by Jon Katz.