• by June 7, 2004

Our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, died June 5 at the age of 93. I went onto the Web trying to find any references he might have made to the Internet while he was president. No luck there, but the Web was mostly used in universities and academic institutions at the time. Remember? The World Wide Web.

There were, however, pages and pages of links to commentary, news stories, interactive slide shows and historical timelines highlighting content about Reagan's life and times and influence. There were also links to speeches he gave.

As I searched for any signs of Reagan's or his administration's awareness of the Web, I wondered what our 40th president, dubbed "the great communicator," would have thought about the Internet as a mass medium and tool for 24/7 communication. This was a man who was schooled in the art of public speaking, especially through the medium of television. As everyone knows, he began his career as an actor. What would he have made of the impact of the Web and 24/7 news cycles, the ability of his words to echo around the world within seconds, and of Web-enabled technologies that make the world a much, much smaller place, but also more dangerous?

Would the freedom-loving libertarian in him have respected blogging and self-publishing on the Web? And how about fund-raising? One might imagine that his anti-big government stance would not have been in favor of poor school districts that have been left behind in the digital revolution.

Overall, I suspect that Reagan's common touch and the response he could draw from of a live crowd would be less compatible with the sterility of the Web.