I thought your article was excellent. It was salutary because this is a topic that needs discussion and excellent because it was well balanced and properly nuanced.

We rarely, if ever, question the benefit of using a new technology. The question “should we build this?” is tantamount in our culture to “can we build this?” So the question itself is salutary as a corrective to our technophilic age.

But I think it was more than thought provoking, it was thoughtful. Twitter has uses no doubt. But my question to Brian Killian is: Can a tweet really be compared to a gesture or a smile at the right moment? Think carefully because the appropriateness of that analogy is at the heart of the discussion.

In fact, we treat such a case less and less like an analogy and more like a dead metaphor and one whose death is quite tragic for us! We speak of “messages from the Pope” that are neither messages (because of their truncated form) nor from the Pope (because they are from his aides). They are like messages but to call them messages is at best a metaphor. Facebook is another example. It parades as personal “communication” when often it is nothing more than a bulletin board.

You should look at Pope Benedict and his Twitter project like Pope Paul VI, the first pope to fly (and the first to leave Italy since 1809!). Leave it to future popes to utilize the media better, more personally, more effectively (like JP the Great trotting the globe!). Our current pope has made the account and laid the foundation and I applaud him (and his staff) for that.

May God bless him and you all of your days!

CRN

Press accounts emphasized that the Vatican was given “careful consultancy” by Twitter itself to insure protection, as far as possible, from the free-wheeling tumult of the service.

My unease with the project lies in the fact that @pontifex technicizes the pope’s pastoral role—renders it efficient but all the more impersonal and illusory, thereby diminishing it at the same time.

In short—if not technically accurate—there ain’t no inbox.

My objection to the Vatican Twitter account is that it seems a piece of theatre, one in
which——as emails like this indicate——the audience is encouraged to sentimentalize the players.

Or what about the people standing in the crowd listening to the words of Jesus. He couldn’t interact personally with each one of them, but certainly his listeners were encountering the person of Jesus through his words.

And I don’t think it’s possible to measure the power of words by counting the number of characters. Even Tweets can mediate the person, affect our faith, and be used by the Holy Spirit.

I think Twitter must be judged my more than just the content that is tweeted. Strictly speaking, the pure content of the papal tweets could be found elsewhere in more developed form. But I think the value of a pope tweeting is more than that. It’s more like a personal gesture, like a smile that a person needed right at that moment.

A tweet from a pope can be a word of encouragement, a gesture of solidarity, a sign of wanting to walk among us common folk ‘virtually’ when it’s impossible physically.

So if it’s true that the pope is not personally involved in the papal Twitter account, that is very unfortunate because to me it’s that personal touch that is most of the value of the whole project.

‘New media’ is not necessarily shallow, incapable of revealing the person. I know because the person of my wife was first mediated to me by it.