Email this page to a friend
Print friendly view
Post your feedback in our forum |
|||||||
 To kick off our new publishing year, Catholica editor, Brian Coyne, has some good news with which to start the year. There's a whole heap of questions too. We call ourselves 'a pilgrim people' — pilgrims on our way to discovering truth and love as it is understood by our Creator-God. How do you find truth, or love, in a digital and three-sentence attention span age? On Twitter you're not even given that luxury. You have to find it in 140 letters or less! Some "Good News" for Catholica... Let me begin with some Good News of our own. In January Catholica averaged 1358 visits a day. That represents a 30% increase on the traffic to our website compared to January last year when we averaged 1046 visitors per day. Do you remember being encouraged to make a "visit" to the Blessed Sacrament? It seems many would prefer to make "digital visits" these days. There'd be many parish churches today that would love to boast visitor figures like that — either in 'visits' to the Blessed Sacrament or visits to their websites. Thank you for the support you extend to us that is enabling us to continue growing. This commentary though has been triggered by three news items of recent days and my own visit to a Canadian Catholic website seeking to use television as a channel of modern communications. I'm going to be presenting some thoughts that, at first might seem disconnected, but I will bring them all together at the end. Item 1: The 'success' of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News...
The first item is really a debate that has broken out in many places on the world wide web in the last week or so concerning the news of Fox News ratings' success in the United States. The debate relates to the strategy Rupert Murdoch has adopted, or encouraged, of developing a conservative, partisan news service biased in favour of the Republican Party and against the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama. The matter is even reported to have caused disquiet within the Murdoch family itself. I am not actually convinced that it is a 'political' strategy Murdoch or Fox News have adapted. Murdoch has long had a very good nose for appealing to the basest human instincts. Stirring up controversy by stirring up the base prejudices and emotions of an audience has proved to be a hugely successful financial strategy. The commercial, and particularly the tabloid media, thrives on stirring up the redneck emotions in society. It's fascinating entertainment for the rest of the population even if wider society might not agree politically with the opinions of the rednecks. What primarily drives the success of the Murdoch publishing empire is ratings, not politics. If titillating the sexual frustrations and animal instincts of the population improve the ratings, or if stirring up the fears and prejudices in the uneducated, non-reflective or insecure sectors of the population brings in the readers, viewers or listeners then Rupert is your man for knowing how to manipulate these things with consummate skill. Whether it is a strategy that advances civilisation, or is morally responsible in terms of civilising society is a different question. The counter-argument advanced of course is that the media merely reflects the mores and aspirations of society in general and no questions of morality are involved. If the readers are attracted to sexual titillation, or stirring up the emotions of the rednecks and the fundamentalists, and that sells newspapers or attracts commercial advertising then the determining factor is corporate profit and growth not questions of morality, or the benefit to civilising society. LINKS: Item 2: Pope Benedict's message for World Communications Day... The second item I mention in passing. It is Pope Benedict's message for World Communications Day encouraging priests and bishops to make greater use of the new mediums of communication available today. His Holiness writes:
"The new digital technologies are, indeed, bringing about fundamental shifts in patterns of communication and human relationships. These changes are particularly evident among those young people who have grown up with the new technologies and are at home in a digital world that often seems quite foreign to those of us who, as adults, have had to learn to understand and appreciate the opportunities it has to offer for communications. In this year’s message, I am conscious of those who constitute the so-called digital generation and I would like to share with them, in particular, some ideas concerning the extraordinary potential of the new technologies, if they are used to promote human understanding and solidarity. These technologies are truly a gift to humanity and we must endeavour to ensure that the benefits they offer are put at the service of all human individuals and communities, especially those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable." Item 3: The President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications' message... The third item is a news report published on Friday by John Thavis of Catholic News Service conveying the views of Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications on this question of how the Church ought use the media and particularly encourage development of initiatives in the new digital channels of communication. Here's a sample of the article which I highly recommend as worth reading in full:
The Vatican Web site remains largely a repository of printed texts, displayed on pages designed to look like parchment. And despite more than a decade of discussion about making the site interactive, www.vatican.va continues to provide information in one direction only: from them to you. LINK: Item 4: My visit to the website of Salt & Light Television... In the course of changing over the featured video on our own video channel the other day I visited again the website of Salt + Light Television in Canada and began perusing the range of programming available on their website. It's an impressive initiative headed by the former CEO of Canada's World Youth Day, Father Thomas Rosica, CSB. Offering programming on cable television across Canada 24/7 the daily schedule seems to offer a good diversity in programming. Here's their video promo which is impressive and gives a quick overview of what they offer — and what they're endeavouring to achieve. I'd be very interested if any of our Canadian or North American readers who are familiar with Salt + Light Television might perhaps write a review for us of their impressions as to how effective it is in attracting an audience, what sort of audience it is attracting, is it assisting or contributing to the slide going on in lay participation? Ten years ago it is the sort of initiative I would have been interested in supporting*. I am not so sure today but let me explain... Communication is not simply a matter of 'making a noise'. If any organisation is communicating, but their message is turning more people off than it is turning people on, the organisation is a fool for continuing that communication no matter how fervently they believe they have some exclusive "access to truth". Despite Pope Benedict's pleas, the Church already has a massive footprint in cyberspace. She (the institution) probably employs around the world more journalists and media producers of various kinds than Rupert Murdoch himself. This is not to mention the massive plethora of "We are so faithful to the magisterium" lay-run websites that are not actually trying to evangelise the world but prove to God, or themselves, that they 'know the rules and the rest of society doesn't'. What is it all achieving though? Participation rates, particularly in the First World where a lot of this communication is viewed is going backwards. There certainly is a challenge in getting priests and bishops to communicate publicly. Most of them are petrified of saying anything in public that might get them into trouble. They speak in motherhood statements and clichés — I'm sure half the time still trying to impress their long-dead mothers what good little boys and girls and obedient citizens they turned out to be. Catholicism didn't become a force that built a civilisation because it was afraid to say anything. It encouraged people to ask questions. It encouraged the 'best and brightest' in society to probe and ask questions about the meaning of life and where we (humanity) are headed. Today the priest voices one tends to see in the media tend to be the John Georges or the George Pells who upset more people than they excite and encourage. The challenge facing Catholic Communications today is not primarily a challenge of technology, or capital, or even of obtaining personnel with the technical or creative skills. The communication challenge is far more fundamental than that. It is how do you shut down the fundamentalists who prevent any questions being asked? How do you free up the teachers, bishops, priests and nuns so that they once again feel confident speaking in public in the language used by the broad population? So much of Catholic Communications around the world today is predicated on trying to prove we are "the one true Church — the one that never makes mistakes and never needs to apologise or explain itself". It is a sin given how much is expended on 'communications' and the net effect of it all is to drive more people out of the pews than it attracts in. Do our leaders ever stop and think that one day they might be held accountable for what has been allowed to happen? The challenge an institution like the Catholic Church faces is finding the balance between trying to be some sort of propaganda machine for a set of beliefs no longer shared by the board population, or following the route taken by Rupert and appealing to the basest human instincts. *Attempts have been made by a number of people in Australia to introduce something similar to Salt + Light Television here. The closest anybody has got has been Catholic Church Television broadcasting for a few hours a week on a cable channel. Part of the Australian problem is simply that the Church here does not have the population base that can financially support such as endeavour. Canada has a population of 12.8 million Catholics in Canada (43.5% of all Canadians) whereas Australia has a population of just over 5 million Catholics or 26.6% of the population and the indications would seem to be that around 86% of them today have minimal if any regular contact with the institution. I'm not sure what the participation rates are like across Canada. LINK: Brian Coyne  Blessings, Brian
We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum. ©2010Brian Coyne |
|||||||
Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of 
How economic inequality harms societies... We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust. Richard Wilkinson, is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, and cofounder of The Equality Trust, a nonprofit that aims to reduce income inequality by educating and engaging the public while supporting political commitment to address the problem. 16m55s [String on the Catholica Forum where the general issue of wealth inequality and this documentary was first discussed 25Jan12] | [WATCH THE VIDEO]
Doco 035: 25Jan12
This site was developed and is maintained by
www.viastuas.net.au
Click HERE to email the Webmaster