Very Online vs. Very Offline
I'm fascinated by extremely successful people who are either very online or very offline.
very online = Twitter power users, online infovores
very offline = not on Twitter, not techy, not hip
I recently spent some time sorting people into categories. For the historical figures, my claim is that they'd be very online or offline if they were alive today. Who did I miss -- or misclassify? [1]
Very online
Contemporaries: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Tyler Cowen, Jack Dorsey, Dave Portnoy, Mark Cuban, Paul Graham, Balaji Srinivasan, Ben Shapiro, J.K. Rowling, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Historical figures: Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Christopher Hitchens, David Hume, John Maynard Keynes, Gertrude Stein; UPDATE 7/18/24: Karl Marx, Ayn Rand
Very offline
Contemporaries: Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Peter Thiel, David Rubenstein, Alex Karp, David McCullough, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jim Simons, Clinton, both Bushes, “old Hollywood” types (Spielberg, Tarantino, Scorsese), Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, Oprah
Historical figures: Washington, Lincoln, Harry Truman, Friedrich Hayek, Immanuel Kant, Steve Jobs, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Dickinson
Not sure
Contemporaries: Mark Zuckerberg (one tweet in twelve years, plus unclear how much he uses his own product), Noam Chomsky (he’s responded very quickly to all of my emails)
Historical figures: Adams, Jefferson, Churchill, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Socrates (truly torn on this one), Gandhi, Thoreau
[1] I've left off people who are less extreme.