PAUL JONES
ers is a test of both our puritan roots and
the grammar rules we learned in first
grade. Even managing the email messages
we think we want and need can feel like a
Greek tragedy, a modern twist on the tale
of Prometheus: We are not chained to
rocks for eternity, but to our inboxes, our
messages repopulating faster than we can
read, sort and delete them, killing our time
over and over again.
Roads not taken
Those who email Jones now receive an
automated response listing 20 alternate ways
to connect, including Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Skype, phone, text, IM and even
You Tube. Since he abandoned the use of
his account last summer, friends’ and colleagues’ responses have run the gamut, from
those laden with exasperation and impossibility to poorly concealed jealousy.
To wit:
“I guess what I think is that, I use the
email, so what the hell is he doing? I don’t
exactly understand why he’s doing what
he’s doing, and I don’t know that I’ll catch
onto it.” (Longtime friend, former UNC
political science professor and Chapel Hill
psychotherapist Lou Lipsitz.)
“I’m too connected to email to get rid
of it. Besides, I work for the U.N., which
is not exactly the most cutting-edge sort of
organization.” (Jim Fullton, a former Jones
colleague and a senior counselor at the
World Intellectual Property Organization
in Geneva.)
“Oh, God, email. Unfortunately, I’m
still using it. I’d like to bury it. It’s a burden.
You get 200, 300 messages a day. You can’t
keep up. I go home at night and catch up
on my email. You just get to work all day
long and all night long with it, and you
never get to stop.” (Judd Knott, information
security manager at UNC, whose very
name conjures the noose around the neck
of time that is his email account.)
And then there was the high school pal
of Jones, who, upon learning that he could
no longer contact him by email, felt aban-
doned. “You used to be my friend,” he
wrote to Jones. “Now we can’t talk.”
Jones is accustomed to drawing resist-
ance; he’s always chased the rubber band’s
snap, always stretched the edges of what
makes us comfortable. He is no more dis-
couraged by the response now than he was
in the fifth grade, when he turned an
assignment to write a fall poem into a con-
demnation of yard work: “Up to my knees
in millions of leaves/And I stood in them
and cursed like hell.”
“I got called by the teacher — you
know: How dare I use that word,” Jones,
62, recalls. “And I went, ‘Well, I’m a Pres-
byterian. I hear it
periodically.’ I had
been reading, and
stuff was in the air if
you were an adven-
turesome reader. It
didn’t seem that
taboo. But I was
made to apologize in
front of the class —
to the teacher, to
the goody two-shoes
who would turn on
me if they thought
my apology was
insincere, and to my
COURTESY OF PAUL JONES
peers who would beat me up on the play-
ground if they thought I was truly sorry.”
Ever the poet, Jones delivered a triple-
register apology that satisfied all involved.
Poor speller, big thinker
The oldest of five and the son of a
homebuilder who “never knew a minute’s
separation between home life and work
life,” Jones grew up in Charlotte under the
spell of his own autonomy; he was open-source before open-source was cool. He
pedaled his bike across Freedom Park and
devoured classic novels that his grandmother, who lived part time with the Joneses, read with him. Anything by Mark
Twain was a favorite. The two were close,
and her influence was transformative. A portrait painter by trade, she sold her works to
the Mint Museum in Charlotte, where she
often took Jones. She also published poetry,
when she wasn’t reciting late 19th- and early
20th-century verse to her grandson.
By the time he was in high school,
Jones was regularly publishing his own
poetry in the mimeographed underground
newspaper he started with friends called
The Inquisition. If not for the foreign language requirement that he couldn’t meet,
he might have become an English major at
UNC. Instead, as a math-and-science
whiz, he enrolled at N.C. State — where
he failed freshman English thanks to his
poor spelling but graduated in 1972, a
member of only the second class of State’s
newly minted major, computer science.
Jones left his job managing the comput-
erized operations of a Libbey-Owens-Ford
glass factory in Toledo, Ohio, to work in
the basement of Phillips Hall in 1977, as a
systems programmer and technical manager
for OIT (Office of
Information Tech-
nology). Within a
decade, he was
transforming cam-
pus life, first with
email and then with
the unrelenting for-
ward march of the
Internet in our
everyday lives.
From the beginning, Jones had set
his sights on the
future and was at
one point threat-
