Tom Mandel (1946-1995)

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

> From next week's TIME Magazine. Posted with permission.


To Our Readers


Anybody who has read TIME in its electronic edition on America Online and
ventured into our computer message boards knows Tom Mandel. For the past
year and a half he has been our online host, greeting new visitors,
starting new topics, steering the discussion, arbitrating the sometimes
contentious debates and teaching us--readers and journalists alike--how
computers can be used to forge new and unexpected bonds among people.


But the most important lesson Tom taught was the one that began last
November, when he announced online that he had been diagnosed with
inoperable lung cancer. In a typically understated message (titled "Host
Status Report") Tom bravely declared that he would enjoy what remained of
his life while doing everything he could "to marshal the army of good cells
to enter into battle with the army of bad cells."


For the next five months he opened his life, and his heart, to a growing
legion of well-wishers--most of whom had never met him face-to-face but who
sometimes felt they knew him better than their friends in the "real" world.


He was a remarkable man. An ex-Marine. A Vietnam veteran. A Jesuit-trained
polemicist with what he proudly claimed was the first college degree in
futurism (from the University of Hawaii). In his workaday job he was paid
by SRI International to peer into the future and tell corporate clients how
to prepare for the 21st century.


But it was on the computer networks that he found his true voice, first at
the San Francisco-based WELL (where he posted tens of thousands of messages
a year) and then at TIME Online. He was a gifted writer and a fearless
debater: witty, opinionated, unflinchingly open and honest. He brought all
those qualities--and more--to his struggle with cancer, and they were
reflected back on him in the staggering array of get-well messages posted
by his online friends.


"I am trying to figure out how to write about this experience we are all
having together," he said in one posting. "In many different traditions to
be alive is to immerse oneself intensely and directly in the world. This is
a new part of the human world, a brand new social construction made up of
people talking to each other mainly through keyboards and screens.
Immersing myself in it even more so than I already have is part of being
alive for me...and part of dying."


Tom Mandel left us last week, listening to the fourth movement of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the "Ode to Joy." He was 49.




Copyright Time Inc. 1995



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Philip Elmer-DeWitt                                           ped () well com
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