The Catholic community has become social: a community with a specific identity; a community that does not deny or exclude its faith but instead lives it to the point of self-giving, and that always looks to its hub: the Lord Jesus. Social media has enlarged, extended and amplified this community. Today, like yesterday and perhaps… Read more »
Window on Communications
To Tell a Story is To Communicate
Massimiliano Padula
Narrate, discern, renew…with the Story of Stories (Sacred Scripture) in the background and in one’s heart. The Message of Pope Francis for the 54th World Communications Day, published on 24 January 2020, the Memorial of St. Francis De Sales, is based on these three verbs. Inspired by Exodus 10:2, “That you may tell your children… Read more »
From the “Crowd of Solitudes” to the Technologies of Community
Usually, we think of the media–above all the digital and social media–from the perspective of a weakening of bonds. As André Caron and Letizia Caronia pointed out a few years ago in a good book: if two people go out to dinner and each one has their own cell phone, then in fact it is… Read more »
Social Webs: Not Cobwebs But Networks
From Like to Amen. The Message for the 53rd World Communications Day is a wake-up call that invites us to discard the logic of like and welcome the logic of the truth because relationships are not founded on emotions or ideals but on who a person truly is. “We are members one of another” (Eph…. Read more »
Does the “digital person” really pay scant heed to the spirit?
The Internet is not like a system of water or gas lines. Nor is it a mass of cables, wires, tablets, cell phones and computers. It would be a mistake to identify the Internet and its use with the technological infrastructure that makes connection possible. Today the Web is, above all in its mobile form,… Read more »
Virtual and Real: An Anthropological Change?
The technological achievements of the Net and of bioelectronics are producing social and economic upheavals on the worldwide level. Technology is influencing the evolution of culture by means of changes that also involve the human being’s conception of him/ herself. Today’s technological culture tends to reduce the human being to a mechanical corporeality or to… Read more »
The Language of Hate Is Poisoning the Net
A growing number of Net users are expressing themselves with aggressive language, which is becoming a communicative style in contemporary society. Immediately amplified by the Net, hate language is by now passively accepted or considered “normal” by almost half of the Net’s users, according to an SWG research. The Net is reproducing more and more… Read more »
52nd World Communications Day: To Become a Land and a Country
In the book The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer and poet, the protagonist–an orphan–closes his eyes to see if, upon reopening them, the world before him has disappeared and been replaced by a better one. Perhaps many of us have done the same thing at one time or another. And… Read more »
Toward the Synod on Young: #Withoutfilters
Speak courageously. Don’t be ashamed. Here, shame should be left at the door. Speak courageously. I say what I feel and if anyone is offended by it, I ask their pardon and move on. You know how to speak like this. But one must also listen with humility. If someone I don’t like is speaking, I… Read more »
Toward the Synod on Young: People Listening by Way of the Internet
The big event is drawing nearer. The XV General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, scheduled for October 2018, will focus on contemporary youth. The Church wants to listen to the new generations. The Synod will be about young people, but when Pope Francis announced the event, he revealed that his intention was to make… Read more »