Trekking the Digital Continent

Julian Fox sdb

September 2011

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Habits of Mind: Media Ecology

Chapter 2: An Eye For an Ear

Chapter 3: Of Maps and Metaphors

Chapter 4: Spirituality: In, Out and All Around

Chapter 5: Soft Pause in medias res

Chapter 6: Upright Citizens in a Digital world

Section: Reflection tools

Chapter 7: Leavening the Digital Continent

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Introduction

Summary

Entering into the adventure of evangelisation in the digital continent requires a suitable metaphor. In this case Tolkien’s The Hobbit can help us undertake the journey. We are reminded that God is present wherever the journey might lead us.

’There and Back Again’ is the subtitle to J.R.R. Tolkien’s universally loved The Hobbit, a story which takes us from our familiar and profane world to a world of strange landscapes and sacred spaces inhabited by wizards, elves, goblins and dragons amongst others. Despite Tolkien’s openly Catholic imagination - he saw his writing as a form of "sub-creation" and an act of divine praise [A]  [A] Jason Boffetti, "Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination", CRISIS Magazine, Nov. 2001. - we do not find any particular confessional kind of world in The Hobbit. We do find a stirring religious imagination, a quest that might in general be termed religious, a journey certainly, and the ’there and back again’ is important in that Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit we first meet in the story, returns home a different person, a better hobbit, no doubt, for all he has been through.

Tolkien initially wrote the story for his own children, but it has become an enduring classic for all ages, with its ability to combine youth’s innate desire to live mythically with some very practical common sense:

I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth" - by which he meant: "What am I going to get out of it? and am I going to come back alive?

 [ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, Chapter 1. The work is now available online, free, from several sources, e.g. http://www.onread.com/book/The-Hobbit-191038/.]

Maybe The Hobbit is our own story writ large! Story and myth provide us with our identity, especially a story such as that of Bilbo Baggins, an unremarkable creature in so many ways:

We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! 

[ Ibid, Chapter 1.]

In fact when Tolkien first scribbled a sentence on a page as he was grading exam papers in the summer of 1928 (he was a University Professor at the time), he had no idea what it meant: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” has since become one of the most recognisable sentences in all of English literature. He had never heard of “hobbits” and had no idea what a hobbit was, but as with most of Tolkien’s stories, the idea begins by naming something. From the name he then went on to explore for himself what a hobbit might be, what kind of a hole it lived in: "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort", and so on.

I am reminded of all this when it comes to speaking about the ’digital continent’. We owe this metaphor to Pope Benedict XVI. Of course we do not know quite how it came about, even for him. Did he scribble it down one day on a piece of paper? Was he on holidays in the beautiful Val d’Aosta perhaps, gazing over God’s creation? Did someone else suggest it to him? For sure he was not correcting exam papers at the time but even Popes are allowed to doodle! We can search in vain for ’digital continent’ other than a brief reference to a digital game, prior to 2009. But something very important was named at the moment Pope Benedict XVI was penning his World Communications Day Message. He brought the phenomenon of cyberspace back to earth so to speak, and opened up all sorts of possibilities for extending his fresh metaphor. The language is not Tolkienesque nor need it be. But it is endearing, with lots of hints of epic travels, enthusiasm, effort and youthful imagination:

In the early life of the Church, the great Apostles and their disciples brought the Good News of Jesus to the Greek and Roman world. Just as, at that time, a fruitful evangelisation required that careful attention be given to understanding the culture and customs of those pagan peoples so that the truth of the gospel would touch their hearts and minds, so also today, the proclamation of Christ in the world of new technologies requires a profound knowledge of this world if the technologies are to serve our mission adequately. It falls, in particular, to young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication, to take on the responsibility for the evangelisation of this "digital continent". Be sure to announce the Gospel to your contemporaries with enthusiasm.

 [ Available from the Vatican Website at http://tinyurl.com/auqkr7 (Tinyurl)]

That paragraph has set in motion many things, especially discussions about how best to evangelise this ’digital continent’, which is why I have begun with The Hobbit. Tolkien once wrote in a letter: “I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalised Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”. That sounds like helpful advice to anyone setting forth on a journey of evangelisation in the digital continent!

Personally I am very glad that Pope Benedict moved away from what he refers to earlier in his Message as the ’so-called cyberspace’. As popular as the term is - or was, since its coiner, William Gibson, has already declared it ’dead’ - it was never a nice term. The novel which bore it for the first time, Neuromancer [E]  [E] William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace; First Edition edition, July 1, 1984, was of a style which many label as ’cyberpunk’, featuring high tech but low life; it evoked consensual hallucination and just about everything that wasn’t nice! It was strange and it was meant to estrange. Very hard to evangelise that sort of thing and would we want to anyway? Let it die.

It was C.S. Lewis, another wonderfully imaginative writer, who spoke of the ’baptised imagination’, stories or interpretations of life that address our real need for transcendence, significance, community, connection with all reality. This is an appropriate kind of imagination for anyone setting out on a journey through the digital continent, if we can imagine it as something more than computer networks and telecommunications and rather as a place which human beings inhabit in some way, and where they interact and transform themselves. In fact I would venture to suggest we could go one step further and speak of the ’consecrated imagination’ if we appreciate that baptism is a consecration, consecration being God’s action alone, and we may need to keep that very much in mind in this new ’continent’, where we will discover that God is there and, by God’s very nature, was always there.

It is time to begin trekking. ’Trekking’ seems an appropriate verb for the digital continent. It poses little difficulty in a connected and globalised world, readily finding acceptance in a host of languages where other terms like ’bushwalking’ or ’tramping’ and the like tend to be a little too localised, or could even be said to lack grandeur. Do we hike the Himalayas? No, we want to trek them! It suggests not just the rural but the rugged. It suggests that there is quite some distance between ’there’ and ’back again’, maybe very many days and nights through an entire region. We are going to find much of that true too as we trek the digital continent. The going might be rugged at times but the vistas will be, hopefully, expansive and expanding.

I will try to keep the language, the terminology of this book as open as possible to a broad readership, though I am aware that it is difficult to speak of any field of human endeavour without some specialist terms. Fortunately the digital world is no longer restricted to ’geeks’. Social media has seen to that. Who will be the trekkers in this new continent? Just about everyone. Pope Benedict, though, has youth in mind and it is to young people that he made special appeal. I have in mind, in particular, a special group of young people, something hinted at earlier when I spoke of the ’consecrated imagination’. Consecrated life is, for all the difficulties it might appear to be going through in our times, an enduring reality in the Church and it continues to attract young - and sometimes older - people who are idealistic in all the right senses of that word.

Whether young or older, and interestingly enough Tolkien’s hobbit hero was in comfortable middle age at 50, members of consecrated life have certain characteristics which we will want to consider in this new context of the digital continent: they publicly profess evangelical counsels such as poverty, chastity, obedience. They are already following someone, Christ, and strive to love God above all else. "They are dedicated to seeking the perfection of charity in the service of God’s kingdom...a splendid sign in the Church as they foretell the heavenly glory". [F]  [F] Code of Canon Law, Can. 573,1 It is these kinds of characteristics, amongst others, that will mark them out as trekkers of a particular kind. They have one great advantage in the digital continent, however, especially if they are young. They have more than a passing acquaintance with the culture, though this introduces a range of special challenges: the culture of the digital continent and that of consecrated life could seem quite opposed, and evangelising anything always means a critical approach to a culture, accepting what can be accepted, eliminating elements that run absolutely counter to Christ, and transforming others that are open to transformation.

1 Habits of Mind: Media Ecology

Summary

Media ecology can help us look carefully at two significant environemnts, the environment of media and that of faith, theology. Media affect our ’habits of mind’. We need new and concrete ways of entering today’s digital culture. We take a look at the Ratio which guides formation in a rapidly evolving set of circumstances and suggest a less instrumental view of media. An integrated approach involving adequate reflection processes and new possibilities for ’virtue ethics’ are suggested. It is made clear that young members of the Church’s consecrated state, and those responsible for their formation, are being addressed in particular.

Nobody tackles a major trek without some solid preparation. Long before the physical preparation, the limbering up, the practice runs, the purchase of absolute necessities (light weight and low cost!), comes the mental preparation. In the digital continent too we need this mental preparation; we need to develop appropriate habits of mind. I would suggest that a very useful approach to habits of mind can be found in a relatively new, but by now established discipline called media ecology. What is this, and why can it be helpful?

The term ‘ecology’ is used [here] because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter….The term ‘media ecology’ is used and in circulation in a number of ways. The term is chosen [here] because this multiple use turns it into a crossroads: Putting these two words next to each other produces a conjunction of two variables that are always busy with meaning. Their dynamism, however, always arises out of concrete conditions. 

[Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, MIT Press, 2005, p 2-3.]

It has been my experience, and hopefully the experience of students as well, that a course called Triple M: Mission, Media and Ministry, which integrates the study of theology with media ecology [Accessible at http://www.sdb.org/mmmsdb/mmm.htm,] has opened up new vistas because it accepts that both theology and media involve the study of environments. The media ecology approach regards communications not so much as a tool or cultural force but as an environment. The word ’ecology’ implies study of environments: their structure, content, impact. These environments consist of techniques as well as technologies, symbols as well as tools, information systems as well as machines, modes of communication as well as media. We quickly find ourselves out there (or is it ’in here’?) in the digital continent but asking theological questions, because theology is an environment too, an environment for belief. Attending to the communication environment of religion and the religious dimension of other environments allows us to move more smoothly between the two. Seen this way, our activity in the digital continent can help resolve, not exacerbate, the divide that some see between faith and technology. Media ecology helps by doing two things in particular: it encourages us to look very closely at the habits of mind that come from the media, from the digital world, often without our being very aware of it, and at the same time it proposes other conscious habits of mind which it considers essential in this context.

Some of the key founders of the media ecology approach have already passed to their eternal reward. Media ecology is not a religious movement but amongst its early founders were some outstanding Catholic names: Marshall McLuhan is one, and we will be hearing more of him in these pages. Fr Walter Ong SJ is another.

The late Neil Postman is credited with actually coining the term ’media ecology’, though some debate this, suggesting that it really was Marshall McLuhan who first used it. In a Keynote Address he delivered at the Inaugural Media Ecology Association Convention, Postman concluded with this interesting punchline:

Let me conclude, then, by saying that as I understand the whole point of media ecology, it exists to further our insights into how we stand as human beings, how we are doing morally in the journey we are taking. There may be some of you who think of yourselves as media ecologists who disagree with what I have just said. If that is the case, you are wrong!

 [Neil Postman, Inaugural Media Ecology Association Convention, Fordham University, New York, New York in 2000]

One has to add that his address already contained sufficient humorous asides to suggest that he wasn’t being simply pompous at this point. He was just making the strong point that media ecology enables us to take a balanced look at the digital continent (a term he obviously did not use in that address) and ask: "Is it not possible that behind the noonday brightness of technological ingenuity there lurks something dark and sinister, something that casts a terrible shadow over the better angels of our nature?". In fact at various times Postman pointed religious people gently in the right direction, as in the case of Technopoly, where he says: "A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God?” [] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books, New York, 1993, p. 19]

That question is spot on. New media effectively alter our ways of thinking, our habits of mind. When we come to consider Marshall McLuhan in greater depth we can say much more about this using his insights, but for now the most important thing is to be aware of the impact of the digital continent on us, whether we consider ourselves ’natives’, ’immigrants’, ’tourists’, or even ’missionaries’ in it, (though I am not sure I really like those terms, as we shall see later). Only then can we begin to tackle a few habits of mind of our own, choosing which ones can help deal with the other ones on offer.

Let me work for a moment with what might seem a rather low-level example: the use of PowerPoint presentations. Those who know me well also know that I choose not to use Powerpoint nor, for the most part, copycat versions by other software providers even if free and open! Perhaps I am not so much talking about the sometimes beautiful meditations, based almost entirely on images, that one often receives as an email attachment, but the use of PowerPoint or its equivalent (anything that gives me the power to point, effectively) as a staple educational medium. Of course it is hardly ’new media’, quite the opposite really, but because it is so familiar, and this is partly the issue, we tend not to question it - it becomes a habit of mind! I happen to be writing these lines just hours after the U.S. Shuttle Program has come to an end. 30 exciting years, which included one terrible accident. I wonder how many know that when the Columbia disaster occurred, and a Board of Investigation was set up, it made the following comment:

As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information is filtered out. In this context it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.

 [ Columbia Accident Investigation Board, 2003, The CAIB Report, Volume 1.]

The Board added that it "views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA". [ Ibid. p. 191]. In other words the bulleted format so typical of Powerpoint advantages a certain pattern that becomes a pure habit, a way of knowing, and this way of knowing disadvantages other ways of knowing. In the Columbia case the result was disastrous. Because I am talking about ’old media’ here, at least for today’s digital native, it does not mean that today’s digital native is aware of quite why he or she rejects the PowerPoint approach. They reject it (I know this from experience in the classroom), but probably because it is ’old hat’, worn out, or maybe, at least one would like to hope, because they do in fact see it as reinforcing a reductionist habit of mind.

So the issue now becomes what other habits of mind we might want to encourage, especially for our evangelising activity in the digital continent. In an interview with Cardinal Hummes, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, L’Osservatore Romano reported his comments on the need for the priest to begin browsing and understanding new technology manuals, now essential (he said) for approaching the digital society: "We are convinced of this to the point where we are examining possibilities for introducing study of this into academic courses for seminarians and priests. Let’s see. Using the Net is also something essential now if we want to keep up with the times". [ L’Osservatore Romano Italian daily edition for 3 July 2009]. He also suggested that these manuals might take a rightful place beside the Summa Theologica!

While study of technology manuals along with the Summa might be helpful along the way, it will not be the most important aspect in forming today’s priest, or anybody else, for that matter, for the digital era. Indeed, there have already been substantial documents preparing the way for an adequate training for the digital world. Already quoting Aetatis Novae, and The Church and the Internet, had this to say:

Education and training regarding the Internet ought to be part of comprehensive programs of media education available to members of the Church. As much as possible, pastoral planning for social communications should make provision for this training in the formation of seminarians, priests, religious, and lay pastoral personnel as well as teachers, parents, and students.

 [ The Church and the Internet, accessible from http://tinyurl.com/5v8eh (Tinyurl)]

The same document points out in its conclusions that "they also need doctrinal and spiritual formation" (n. 11). The Church’s mission is to communicate the full life of Jesus Christ to people and this requires the evangelisation of culture, (’inculturation’ is the term the Church regularly uses), which touches profoundly on the need for the priest to enter into culture today in a way that brings him into contact with all its reality, but with a discernment that also allows him to test everything and keep only what is good. That is a tall order, especially when one comes to digital culture - and undoubtedly it is this that Cardinal Hummes is really hinting at with his reference to manuals dealing with aspects of new technology. There have to be real, concrete ways after all, of entering into a culture, and knowing something of its languages is part of that. Study of this kind, for the priest or candidate in formation to priesthood or to consecrated life, needs to be also seen in relation to spiritual formation. There is a tendency to think of the digital world as simply secular and away from all things spiritual. Challenge number one, I would say, is to redress that tendency.

If we are quoting Aetatis Novae, we are in fact quoting the last Pastoral Instruction to emerge in the area of pastoral guidance for the Church’s mission as it involves communications, media, new technologies, as at the time this book is being written. The Pastoral Instruction was written some twenty years ago, and in terms of ’rapid development’, digital culture today is barely recognisable in comparison to what it was 20 years ago! There is clearly need for an update, one which takes today’s circumstances into account but which is open to future and almost certainly similarly rapid development. Nobody pretends that this will be easy, but everybody agrees it is necessary, and in fact such a renewed document is well in the making.

At this point it seems necessary to mention another document that has to be a key to appropriate habits of mind in the digital continent for ’trekkers’ who have a ’consecrated imagination’. I refer to the document we often refer to as The Ratio.

The Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Priestly Formation (Optatum Totius) tackled the question of providing a ’Programme of Priestly formation’ to be drawn up by Episcopal Conferences, revised at definite intervals, and approved by the Holy See. The first basic plan of this kind to be drawn up after the Council was called the Ratio (Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis is its full title). The idea was not entirely new. It had been in place in some Religious Orders - one can go back to St Ignatius and the Jesuits - for centuries.

In the light of attitudes and habits of a digital culture today, and in the light of what can happen in ten or twenty years of rapid development, it might be very important to look at such a Ratio, which will always have a combination of time-worn traditional principles along with particular circumstances. We need to see if it reflects the kinds of realities today’s candidates are living in, even though these will differ considerably around the world. Candidates for the priesthood or for consecrated life today are as likely to come from a village in Africa as they are from a suburb in one of the world’s Western mega-cities. For that reason a Ratio cannot descend to too many particulars, leaving that to local contexts to draw up. If anything, this places even more weight on the general guidelines to give an appropriate grounding for the eventual particulars.

Having said that, I have no doubt that we should begin by looking at some particulars that are shared by many young candidates today and will be more so tomorrow, across national and cultural boundaries.

They all know about and most have access to the World Wide Web. The Web’s success, built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors:

     1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other;

     2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications;

     3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications.

Today these characteristics of the Web are easily overlooked as obvious, self-maintaining, or just unimportant, and amongst the serious issues emerging is the reality that we cannot just assume that the Internet and the Web which sits on top of it, will always be ’open’ and ’free’. All who use the Web to publish or access information take it for granted that any Web page on the planet will be accessible to anyone who has an Internet connection, regardless whether it is over a dial up modem or a high speed multi-megabit per second digital access line. We now expect that the next blockbuster site or the new homepage for someone’s kid’s local soccer team will just appear on the Web without any difficulty. The same applies, obviously, to parishes or religious communities. There is no reason why they should not have a web site today - and probably every reason why they should.

In other words we are talking about a reality that was conceived of as fundamentally free and open, built on top of the open Internet, but whose freedom and openness could also be under threat today. Any citizen of the digital continent would do well to bear that much in mind, just as someone who loves trekking beautiful, if rugged, open spaces needs to know that not too far away someone may be illegally logging, or shooting the wildlife, or that even, somewhere in the echelons of Government, there are plans to build a dam! However, just taking the current Free and open aspect, we need to ask ourselves why we are so often prepared to spend huge amounts of money having things done for us, building very expensive web sites for example, when basically the entire system is open. The W3C Consortium and/or the WHATWG offshoot, which guide development of the HTML language used to write web sites explain all the protocols and processes needed to build a web, and it only requires some people to learn these languages. Everything of this kind is in the public domain. Can we imagine saying to children today – "no need to learn to read and write; just pay someone to do that for you while you concentrate on other things"? Similarly today web literacy needs to be considered along with reading and writing as a basic skill. A formation programme for young Religious that left it out would be missing something very important.

At a certain point it becomes necessary to make reference to this or that Ratio, not every Ratio in general. The Salesian Congregation has a Ratio of its own (known in English as The Formation of the Salesians of Don Bosco: Principles and Norms) which includes essential elements in formation to consecrated life and also to priesthood. The comments to follow draw from that Ratio. [ The Formation of the Salesians of Don Bosco, Principles and Norms, Third edition, Rome 2000].

Under the heading of Responsible freedom, we find a reference to serious critical formation which enables people:

to pass respectful and objective judgements on persons and events and take a stand on cultural models and social norms. From this point of view it is important to be able to look at the means of social communication [read ’media’] critically and use them responsibly (Ratio, no. 3.1.5).

To look at these media critically today also means to understand what habits of mind they promote. Today we can get information from a wide range of sources, via ubiquitous media and gadgets. Once it was a question of radio, TV, telephone, mail (snail) and newspaper, and these to some extent, at least in a community context, had a community control factor about them, meaning that it was the community which often had the radio and TV set put at the disposition of its members, or placed phones in appropriate places for members’ use, bought several newspapers, and so on. Today this situation has changed dramatically and irrevocably. In fact the habits of mind of today’s Internet or internet-enabled gadget user almost certainly did not form part of the thinking of those who wrote the Ratio or reviewed it in the Year 2000. We need to ask ourselves what might need to be added to or be rephrased, in the case of the Ratio, to deal with these new habits of mind, or to suggest counter ones.

It was interesting that the 26th General Chapter of the Salesian Congregation singled out two kinds of media in particular: personal and convergent. [P]  [P] Da Mihi Animas Cetera Tolle, Chapter Documents, GC26, Rome, 2008 These often combine. We could call personal media by other names – most mobile devices today are personal media, and allow their users to do a range of things which would once have been achieved by different media and devices: a user can send and receive text, take a still photo, play games, access the Internet, send and receive email, engage in instant messaging, play music, record a video, get mobile maps and watch TV or video all from a single device in some instances! Media convergence.

The same General Chapter indicated that:

The culture of personal media can compromise one’s ability to mature in personal relationships and exposes young people to the danger of very negative encounters and dependencies. This is the ’playground’ where we need to be present in order to listen, enlighten, and to guide  [ Ibid, no. 109].

Elsewhere the Chapter asked various departments at the level of leadership in the Congregation to reflect on the “new challenges of the culture of personal media for formation”. Examine both contexts of the term culture of personal media for a moment. The contexts suggest that this is a "playground" where those doing the forming, the educators, need to be present in order to "listen, enlighten, guide". I doubt that this is meant to be a comment on online spiritual direction (though it may not exclude that) but rather to be a comment on accompaniment of young people who are part of the online culture. But the context seems to suggest a generally negative view of media effects. This of course may well be true, but rather than simply accepting it as true, a balanced approach such as we find in media ecology studies could help us discern where it is true and where it is but a knee-jerk reaction to something that could also be a wonderful opportunity for evangelisation.

It does not take much imagination to broaden this discussion beyond the Salesian Congregation to the formation of all candidates to the priesthood or consecrated life.

Things are moving fast. The Ratio I am talking about was published in 2000. Ten or twenty years later, let’s look ahead with 2020 vision.

Maybe before we do anything else, we may need to consider what a hypertext version of the Ratio would do to it! Of course there are ’books’ in the digital continent, but most of its natural denizens prefer hypertext versions. Let’s be a bit playful here to begin with. Most of us are accustomed by now to hypertext - we meet it on a regular basis on any website. Maybe though we haven’t reflected all that much on what it can really mean until we see a complete text, a ’book’, if you want to put it that way, presented as hypertext. It makes you think! It really does! There is no need for a ’first page’ as such, for chapters that follow in a particular order. In fact it is the reader/user who imposes the order. I think, rather than spend many words trying to explain what a hypertext version of the Ratio could do to a discussion of formation, it might be better to provide the reader with the following link. Enjoy the B.O.O.K and see if you can solve the puzzle!

http://artificeeternity.com/bookofsand/

But being less playful and more serious, we have other issues to consider for a Ratio for 2020.

We need to contend with three ’laws’ that we find frequent enough reference to: Moore’s law which suggests that computing power doubles every 18 months, the disk law which says that storage power doubles every 12 months, and Gilder’s law which says that communications power doubles every 2 to 3 years. Whether or not we give too much credence to these as ’laws’, the trend is clear enough – rapid, indeed phenomenal development. Let’s assume that by 2020 the mobile device will be the Internet access tool for most of the world’s people, and that certain boundaries, e.g. between personal and work time, between physical and virtual presence, will be much more blurred even than they are today. What will all this do in terms of human relationships? We cannot answer that in any precise form but we can think about a world where, at least on a personal basis, everything is available all the time, information is available on demand, people can create content at will, social networking will really matter, people can easily time-shift and space-shift, conversations get ’bigger’ (more people involved), ’deeper’ (to the extent that technology permits and facilitates this sort of depth), and can be archived for recall. All this undoubtedly affects human relationships.

Maybe that is putting things mildly! While preparing these thoughts, I have been reading two wildly different approaches to technology, both predating the digital era as we now know it. One is a short story (a rather long one) by E.M. Forster, written 100 years ago, called The Machine Stops  [ E. M. Forster, The Machine stops, 1909 and by now in the public domain. It can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/y9ykmoy]. It is an apocalyptic piece, but astounding for its prophetic character in that it foresees email and videoconferencing, and explores the effects of technology - future for Forster, now for us - on human relationships. The other is The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin  [ T. de Chardin, The Phenomenon of man, Harper Perennial, 23rd edition, December 24, 1975].  He gave us the term ’noosphere’, which he describes as a “membrane of thought” covering the earth. Bear in mind that although The Phenomenon of Man was first published in the late 1950s, it was written in 1938. A 1947 article by Chardin actually represented what may be his last published thinking on the subject. In this essay, entitled “The Formation of the Noosphere,” Chardin discussed the necessity of a mechanical infrastructure for this sphere of thought. Although his focus for such an infrastructure was radio and television networks, he also mentioned the possibility that computers might one day provide the mechanical infrastructure of the noosphere. [ Available at www.religion-online.org: http://tinyurl.com/3mw9ogb].  Internet, then? His is a far more hopeful vision than Forster’s. Chardin saw a final point where spirit would descend into matter in a final act of convergence and transcendence. Do we dare have this kind of optimism today?

One of the first things I believe should find its way into a Ratio is a way to acknowledge an important new reality currently not mentioned there. While we refer (I am still drawing my particulars from the Salesian Ratio) to “means of social communication” and the need to “use them responsibly”, we may still be coming out of an era that sees these as tools. The view is still instrumental. There is now another reality out there we need to name and deal with. Digital culture as represented by these media is a way of life, and as a way of life (’ubiquitous’, ’personal’ and ’convergent’ all help to make up this way of life and carry with them their own habits of mind) it is in competition with other forms of life, including ’consecrated life’. A candidate for the latter may have made a decision for everything it stands for, but this does not mean rejecting the former. The question is how to integrate it into consecrated life in such a way that the wholeness, integrity and authenticity of the consecrated way of life is not compromised.

Integration is the key. In Vita Consecrata Blessed Pope John Paul II stated that formation "must include every aspect of Christian life. It must therefore provide a human, cultural, spiritual and pastoral preparation which pays special attention to the harmonious integration of all its various aspects" [ Accessible at http://tinyurl.com/abfv5].  Prior to his election as Pope, writing under his own name, Karol Wojtyla, he had made it clear that integration is achieved only through acts of self-possession, self-governance and self-gift  [Karol Wojtyla, “Love and Responsibility”, accessible at http://tinyurl.com/3wuow8k]. Personal and convergent media need personal and integrative formation strategies.

In recent times, emphasis in religious, consecrated life, seminary life too for that matter, has been placed on two tools which are aimed at the kind of integration we are talking about: the community project and the personal project of life. The task now is to see that these two actually contain adequate reference to the challenges coming from such things as personal and convergent media, and other similar challenges in this area. The personal project, for example, is not so much about things to do, but involves planning ones life in the short, medium and long term in the light of the charism and mission of the institute to which one belongs. It raises questions of identity: who am I here and now and who am I supposed to be to be faithful to myself as well as to my calling?

These projects will ideally build in reflection processes.

And finally, it was not mere whim that led me to write an earlier book about digital virtues  [ Julian Fox, Digital Virtues, Lulu.com, 2007]. One approach we can take to formation is to strengthen our understanding of the ’virtuous life’, bearing in mind virtues that are especially relevant to this scene. The everyday media are not particularly filled with the spirit of God, but the approach is not to ban these media because of it, apart from the fact that one can only with great difficulty and potential damage to personal integrity, ’ban’ personal media. We need to bring the concept of the virtuous life to the reality we face. There are fine resources within the Catholic camp for understanding virtues. Take The Catechism of the Catholic Church, on ’The virtues’, for example.

[ Accessible at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM]. 

One finds here a succinct statement of matters that formation programmes traditionally take up in one way or another.

There is little doubt in my mind that our current Salesian Ratio does provide excellent direction regarding the theological and moral virtues as traditionally stated. It is just that the digital world may also benefit from the contemporary interest in, say, the ’virtue ethic’ approach which is less focused on acts but on who we are, who we are to become and how to get there. Virtue ethics was always part of the Church’s tradition, especially Aquinas, but has waxed and waned in emphasis - sometimes on duty, sometimes on natural law. With its particular focus today on the moral character of persons and goals, rather than on rules and consequences, contemporary virtue ethics may well be instructive for the trekker in the digital continent. The language is not so different: prudence and justice are certainly there, but there are new focuses especially in terms of relational virtues: fidelity (relationship to others) and self-care (relationship with oneself). The Catholic strand in virtue ethics looks to four sources for living virtuously: Scripture, the Church’s teaching, the secular sciences (e.g. psychology, anthropology...), and personal experience.

What is required, certainly where media are concerned, is formation to a sound spirit of discernment and, more broadly, to a proper understanding of the media, the techniques they use and the effects they have on us. A fundamental ethical principle needs to be inculcated, that is, that the human person and the human community are the end and measure of the use of media. Communication should be by persons for the benefit of the integral development of other persons. Neil Postman might not have had quite that kind of language in mind when he concluded his address to the Inaugural Media Ecology Convention in 2000, the same year the Salesian Ratio was revised, but I have a feeling he would have been happy with it.

2 An Eye For an Ear

If your whole body was just one eye, how would you hear anything? (1 Cor 17)

Summary

Marshall Mcluhan helps connect a long tradition of Aristotelian and Scholastic thinking with today’s media reality. He stresses the importance of understanding what he calls ’figure-ground’ differences and leads us to consider the truly formal effects of media, rather than what most people think is the effect of media on us. From him we learn of the importance of training the senses, understanding the nature of ’acoustic space’. He offers us a useful analytical tool.

As we move into an area we are trekking, especially for the first time, we naturally seek a guide. This guide will have ’been there, done that’, hopefully, and not be someone who has just read a book about it. When it comes to the digital continent, we are painfully aware that since it is relatively new territory, our guides may not have been there very long or often, or they are too close to the scene, too immersed in it now to have had the chance to stand back and reflect wisely on things. They can help us with the foreground, the outstanding peaks and troughs, but they may not yet have a true perception of less distinct contours and value contrasts as forms recede into the background. So I have chosen a guide who did not actually belong to the digital continent, or at least, since we are talking about someone who died in 1980, the closest he might have come was to live in the Star Trek era! But for all that, Marshall Mcluhan, who shall be our guide, was so attentive to the background of the emerging electronic media (as he referred to it), that he could understand root or formal causes which have not substantially altered in our time. The peaks and the valleys of the digital continent are by now different, and we can find guides for these no doubt. McLuhan can help us with the less distinct contours and the value contrasts.

Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) is far more profound than the two aphorisms for which he is usually quoted: the medium is the message and global village. Some regard him as the greatest media theorist of all time. He waxed lyrical about the ’electric’ world but he is also said to have remarked, on one occasion, that the "electric universe" was "an unholy impostor....a blatant manifestation of the anti-Christ"  [ Cited by Gary Wolf in “The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool” from Wired Magazine, Issue 4.01 Jan 1996]. He let it be known that the devil was in the media. And despite the fact that he died before the digital world really became part and parcel of our daily lives, the current revisiting of McLuhan’s understanding and appreciation of what was happening via contemporary media may have much to offer us.

Wired Magazine proclaimed him its ’patron saint’. Playboy gave him an extended interview. Neither of them were all that much interested in the fact that he converted to Catholicism after reading G. K. Chesterton in his youth, spent his entire professional life teaching in Catholic institutions, fathered 6 children whom he dutifully, with his also converted Catholic wife, took to Mass on Sundays and prayed the rosary each evening. They do not mention that he became a consultor to the Pontifical Council (then Commission) for Social Communication in 1973 to which he offered solid advice, largely ignored in his view.

McLuhan’s approach to media is more metaphysical than anything else. He has little time for a sociological approach to the question. When he said that the medium is the message, he was putting Aristotle into modern language - as he put it in a letter to William Kuhn:

The person who turns on an electric light is the content of the electric light, just as the reader of a book is the content of a book. This is standard Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrine, that the cognitive agent is himself thing and content. 

[Letters of Marshall McLuhan, “to William Kuhn”, Dec. 6, 1971, Oxford University Press; 1st edition March 1, 1987 p. 448]

One does not go far into reading McLuhan before realising that he places enormous focus on the human senses and what is happening to them, and that he happened to believe that we might just have fallen into the trap that St Paul alludes to in his question about being all eye and therefore not hearing anything! "The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear”  [ Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, Gingko Press 2001 edition. pp. 44]. The entire history of literacy brought the eye into focus (literally!). But it is no longer the eye which is the focus in the digital continent, instead, the ear. We need now to explore why this is so and what it means for us, but an excellent starting point, one to keep very much in mind in the rest of this discussion, is to keep the distinction in mind that McLuhan and others, Ong especially, made between oral and literate culture [ Cf. in particular Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: Methuen, 1988, though first published in 1982]. In this distinction, oral culture offered a hearing dominated sensory world and literate culture an eye dominated sensory world. But for McLuhan, just as ’eye’ meant many other things, linear arrangement, logic, homogeneity amongst them, so too the ’ear’ is symbolic of many things - all-round sensation, not just the ear, which hears from all directions; membership of the tribe with its stories, particular memory processes, and so on. Keeping the distinction between ’eye’ and ’ear’ at work in a broader ’sensorium’, then, will reap benefits as we read on.

McLuhan employs Aristotle’s idea of the sensus communis which is the sense that allows all the senses to work together in harmony and balance, and he makes the interesting point that electronic technology has extended this aspect of the human being - the unifying factor might well be, according to him, outside the individual. For McLuhan, all our electronic gadgets, but also the car, for example, are but ’extensions of man’. This is why he places great store on the community, on external consciousness and consensus being as important as and at times more important than individual consciousness. And he places great store on what he calls training of the senses, to maintain sensual interplay and unity. This was one of his strong recommendations to the Church for its formation of clergy - and I don’t believe we have been sufficiently aware of this.

There are many lessons we can take from McLuhan, though his language can be dense, he often co-authored his material, and frequently his deepest insights were hidden inside word-playful aphorisms that needed to be understood in the broad context of his work. What might interest us at this point are some of his least-quoted ideas, the thoughts he expressed either to or about the Pontifical Commission for Social Communication.

Let’s take the question of the training of the senses. Writing to the secretary of the Commission, Monsignor Panciroli, he says:

It has been my experience over many years of teaching the perception of the media that it requires a considerable period of time to foster reception of these things. A few days, or even a few weeks at the Vatican would serve very little purpose. My student and friend, Walter J. Ong, S.J. has some studies which simplify my approach somewhat. I recommend his The Presence of the Word... and his Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue ... as complementary to my own work. 

[ McLuhan to Monsignor Panciroli, 19 February 1975. As cited in Andrew Brian Chrystall, 2007, "The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan", A dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D in Media Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, Aoteraroa/New Zealand].

Apart from noting McLuhan’s reluctance to actually go to Rome to attend meetings of the Commission, we can note his insistence on the long-haul process of teaching perception of the media. What does he mean by this? He believed and taught four things in particular about the effect of media on the senses:

That a medium has its effects primarily on a sense other than those with which it directly communicates. Is television visual? No, he would say, it is tactile!;

That any medium affects all the senses to a degree, and that an individual’s ‘sensorium’ is ideally in a state of balance or equilibrium. The argument already alluded to that there is a ’common sense’ which helps to unify the others;

That this ratio is constitutive of rationality or consciousness itself. So if we want a truly aware, rational person, we need to work hard to train our perception to maintain the ratio;

That an imbalance of the senses induced by media can deprive one of one’s “rationality” or consciousness. As we have unfortunately witnessed in our own times when impressionable young people commit unspeakable outrages and we often discover from Facebook pages and the like how they were loners, extremists, misfits, in short, unbalanced.

The first of these ideas might be the most difficult to grasp, the last the easiest.

He saw the basic task of education/formation as providing the tools to train our perception. These tools used images, probes, questions, experiments - anything that could get a student to examine his or her perception of things. He was fond of the Gestalt type object, for example, to make us question what we are really seeing. We could ask to what degree this is taken up seriously in our formation processes, not Gestalt as such but real training of the senses, aesthetics and the like. Are we concerned with training senses and perceptions or with “stuffing brains" (as Mcluhan himself put it on one occasion!)? He saw human beings as being formed through the total environment and not through narrowly defined pedagogical techniques that take place in a classroom. For anyone who knows something of the history of Don Bosco’s troubles with the Archbishop of Turin over how he was forming his ascritti, literally ’enrolled members’ or what today we are obliged to call ’novices’, or how he insisted on the importance of the ambiente, the environment, or his use of stories, and messages around the walls - we might consider that Don Bosco was years ahead of McLuhan!

Figure 2.1 Typical Gestalt figure-ground image

McLuhan typically used a Gestalt device to focus on the importance of figure and ground. The image relies on a very delicate balance (just as our senses do). The moment one or other figure begins to dominate the scene, the balance is destroyed and the other element becomes the ground or background for the figure which comes to the fore. Then if you try to think of all the figures at once you get nothing! Just lines and shapes which have no meaning for us. McLuhan goes on to remind us that WE are the figure as long as we are conscious. Now comes the surprise! Did you think, as you were looking at the Gestalt image that you were dealing with a visual impression? That is what it seems to be but it ultimately registers on a completely different sense, says McLuhan which can best be described as ’touch’. How can he say that? Listen (in your imagination at least - which sense are we using here??) to the Playboy Interview:

     PLAYBOY: But isn’t television itself a primarily visual medium?

     MCLUHAN: No, it’s quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is a visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV’s tactile power is that the video image is one of low intensity or definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer. The TV image is a mosaic mesh not only of horizontal lines but of millions of tiny dots, of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick up only 50 or 60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly filling in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into in-depth involvement with the screen and acting out a constant creative dialog with the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoon-like image are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. 

[ From "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan", Playboy Magazine, March 1969]

In other words, going back to the Gestalt figure again, while it appears to be all to do with the visual sense, McLuhan reflects that trying to work out whether it is two faces, a vase, or just shapes that mean nothing, forces us to get very directly involved. The image is of "low intensity or definition and thus.....offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer". A simple enough exercise when all said and done, but one that calls into question our use of our senses, forcing us to ask which ones we are using. That’s why we can talk about ’grasping’ an idea, ’getting in touch’ with something.

Today’s digital continent is experienced very much this way, in terms of a tactile, all-enveloping, ’acoustic’ space, which may not be directly related to the ear as such, but involves all our senses. McLuhan called it ’acoustic’ because it does not have the individualistic, linear ’point of view’ of the eye about it, rather the connected, all-embracing, multidimensional feel of the electronic environment. Digital games illustrate this acoustic space well; they are an environment we must inhabit; these games are more acoustic than they are visual and require immediacy, connectivity, which is consistent with his notion of what acoustic space is. While he relates acoustic to the human ear, it is not actually ’hearing’ that is the key to understanding this space, but all the other senses that are called upon as well. If anything, ’acoustic’ is more epistemological than aural. Visual space, on the other hand is linear, sequential, logical, alphanumeric. It is a more homogeneous space. Electronic media subvert this by introducing acoustic space which is multidimensional, resonant, tactile, holistic.

Marshall McLuhan developed another exercise which makes the point in yet another way. His ’tetrad’ was finalised with the help of his son Eric  [Marshal and Eric McLuhan, Laws of media, The New Science, University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, September 16, 1992]. It relates to figure-ground but also helps us understand media from another point of view: not just the effects but the causes, this time. Tetrads help us to work out what is the formal cause. This too needs some explanation, but having just described the idea of figure and ground, it helps to say that the ’formal cause’ is the ’ground’ in a media experience, and because it is the ground (or background, if that makes it easier to follow) it is less perceptible, normally. It fades into the background, literally! This idea is very important when we are dealing with gadgets in today’s digital continent! Gadgets are very much the ’figure’. They dominate, and we can make errors by trying to deal with the gadget as if it is the problem, when in fact the formal cause, the ’ground’ is the problem! it is this which needs to be tackled in many questions of formation and education. Is the cell phone ’figure’ the problem, or is it the socially destabilising nature of the technology, the ’ground’ or formal cause, that is the problem? That is the question! And we are fortunate in 2011 to have an excellent example of this played out in real time. On January 28, the Egyptian government shut down mobile phone networks and the Internet. McLuhan called media “extensions of man” not just the eyes and ears, but all the moral and intellectual faculties. That certainly was the case in Egypt as it has been elsewhere too, and we now know something of the results. Shutting down the phone and Internet system did not stop a revolution! The tetrad is McLuhan’s way of helping us probe what might be the formal cause, the ground of things. Let’s take a look at it.

The tetrad is arrived at through a process of asking questions based on historical, social, and technological knowledge of the subject:

What does any artefact enlarge or enhance?

What does it erode or obsolesce?

What does it retrieve that had been earlier obsolesced?

What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of its potential?

Figure 2.2 The Tetrad

These questions result in a set of four effects, namely: enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal. These four elements are in a resonant relationship (or "interchange") with one another; the parts of the tetrad are in a complementary relationship.

Figure 2.3 Blog

Figure 2.4 Facebook

We could devise different responses to these four questions in each case - there is no specific ’right’ answer. The point is to probe the situation and take the focus off the ’figure’ to discover the ’ground’ and the formal cause we really need to take into account.

The tetrad is presented as universal laws of human artefacts. They applied it and tried it on communications artefacts, clearly, but it has been used to diagnose and analyse other extensions of the human being - and this could include, for us, the ’personal project’ or ’community project’. Eric McLuhan says that no exceptions have yet been found to these laws. Nor has a fifth law been discovered.

Marshall McLuhan insisted, with Ong, that new human possibilities will not arise outside of technological experience, but inside the field of technology, therefore we had better start reflecting on technology and its impact on us. It is creating the very culture we live and breathe. So when we speak of the ’digital continent’, it is us and our culture we are referring to, not something outside and beyond us. In McLuhanesque terms, it is at most an extension of ourselves and our culture, with consequences that arise from this fact. Just around the date of the centenary of McLuhan’s birth, which occurred on 21 July 1911, Archbishop Claudio Celli, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication, said as much when addressing the Bishops of Brazil: "“If the Church does not become aware of the cultural changes that are occurring due to the system of communications currently in use, we will have much difficulty evangelising in the near future".

The digital continent would have been a dominantly acoustic space for McLuhan, with all the consequences that flow from that. One of the clearest consequences that flows from his understanding is that formation to communication is not about how to use gadgets for more effective communication or evangelisation, though not excluding that obviously. He was interested in telling the Church in his own times that it was not about manuals and messages for more effective evangelisation but about what this kind of world is doing to us! Media are an environment, in fact media are the extension of the human being - we are the message! Of Jesus Christ, McLuhan said: "In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same”  [Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light, Gingko Press; First Printing edition, May 2002 p. 102]

3 Of Maps and Metaphors

Summary

We may kid ourselves that we are thinking reflectively when in fact we are thinking intuitively, on reflex. This is especially true when we consider the hidden power of language and metaphor. We take a look at a shift in papal metaphor over recent years when looking at digital matters, and the value of the ’embodied space’ that it has consistently retained. We explore the dynamics of human networking.

When we set out on a long trek, understanding where we are headed is as important as knowing where we have come from. That sounds like a truism, though when it comes to trekkers who belong to an old and established religious tradition, the experience is that we can spend an inordinate amount of time and emphasis on ’where we have come from’, and much less on ’where we are headed’. The changes wrought in the past several decades by, let’s just call it ’the digital’ in all its guises, has meant that we can no longer avoid looking closely at where we are headed, because we seem to be headed wherever it is very fast!

Bearing in mind that we chose a guide in the last chapter who wants us to look closely at the difference between figure/foreground and ground/background but especially at whatever is happening in between, that means we might need to camp beside the track occasionally and do some thinking about where exactly we are. It is a very fine thing to know where we have come from since amongst other things we might need to backtrack at some point! Human beings who know quite where they are going are certainly admirable and worth following. For most of us, though, just establishing where we are now is the big challenge.

That said, the aim of this chapter is to establish where we are now with a view to moving forward in the direction of a spirituality of and for the digital continent in the following chapter. It will require us to pause for a while to examine the maps we have at hand: "He loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink"  [The Hobbit, Ch. 1]. Most maps have more than signs on them. They have words too, but the words may also conjure up images which help interpret the signs. Only last night I was watching a TV program explaining the work of the chief sign maker at Schipol Airport, Amsterdam. Part of his explanation included casual discussions inside the terminal with passengers looking at the large map displays he has very carefully devised. Many of them were unable to work out where to go despite it all!

Consider for a moment that we could be reading a spiritual book which is inviting us not to lose sight of the fact that we also live in a busy world where technology and modern communications are a normal part of our lives. Imagine that the author has the intention of inviting us into wholeness, a new consciousness, and suggests we need to re-enchant our world by uniting sacred and secular. Technology and communications obviously cannot be ignored in all this, but consider what might be going on if the text were to contain phrases like: “the communications revolution swamps us with information overload”; “we think we have a private hotline to God”; “a world dominated by technology”. The unconscious dimension of metaphor (its ’ground’ in McLuhan’s terms) is what makes it so powerful. Phrases of the kind would work against the notion of wholeness because they hint that technology is only negative.

Amongst more recent studies by cognitive scientists, Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002), considers that human thought is governed less by reflection and more by reflex or intuition, what he calls ’System 1’, as distinct from ’System 2’ thinking  [Kahneman & Frederick (2002). "Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment". In Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman (eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 49-81). Cambridge University Press]. It is a rapid cognitive process, unconscious (most of our thoughts are unconscious), and associative. Kahneman is not suggesting that System 2 reflective thinking is better than System 1 reflexive thinking, just that we might think we are being reflective when in fact we are being reflexive. Indeed, he suggests that once we have been reflective, we might well pass our conclusions across to intuition for future reference. Now, I am thinking in particular of people who have been, or are being trained in an understandably rational, logical styles of thought such as we might find in formation processes in religious congregations or for candidates to priesthood in seminaries. People may feel they are being very rational most of the time, but cognitive scientists like Kahneman disagree. George Lakoff, a very well known name in the study of metaphor, comes at it from a different angle, but arrives at a similar conclusion  [ George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980]. He indicates that the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor we require to express ourselves, and for one or other reason the people who use them often do not notice them.

So that sets one thinking. What is the kind of language we use nowadays about the spiritual when it involves Internet, the digital? Has it shifted over the short but rapid period of change in which we have begun to consider these things part of everyday life? What of the Church’s Magisterium, the Papal Messages, especially the most recent, dealing with digital questions [ Especially the World Communications Day Messages of Pope Benedict XVI 2009-11 but other documents going back as far as Vatican II which began to really engage with the contemporary communications era] - is there anything that stands out especially with regard to a shift in metaphor use?

We are ’People of the Book’, but we ought not be surprised to realise, too, that the ’book’ is partly the product of technology as well as divine inspiration and human effort. Writing is a technology, accomplished with papyrus and pen, or the printing press, or the keyboard, and each technology and its associated technologies plays its part in shaping both the ’book’ and the ’people’ So, words, metaphors, technologies involved in expressing them, how one is shaping the other, and how they combine in shaping us - all this must be of interest to us.

We ought not be surprised that the metaphors that have been universally used for the Internet (that is, translated in much the same way, or simply adopted from one language into another without translation), have been predominantly spatial ones, and within that group, at least initially, they were (and are) often seafaring ones: navigation, net, flow, just to mention three that have been around since we began to talk of the Internet, while phishing would suggest the same source domain to a speaker of English, though not to other languages, just as a hobbit who lives in a hole might suggest ’rabbit’ to the English speaker, but not to others. It is instructive to look at two documents of the Church, the Church and Internet and Ethics in Internet, both from 2002, and compare them with the three most recent Papal Messages for World Communications Day (2009-11), all three of which speak of the Internet.

We expect all these documents to operate within the broader metaphorical system of salvation, since this is the ’business’ of the Church. I say broader, because even if we find a negative metaphor pointing to the damnation possibilities of Internet, this does not mean a different metaphorical system. Conflicting metaphors are possible, and we would be surprised not to find them, otherwise we are left with mere Utopianism. Consider that many a medieval map, for all its exciting possibilities of new discovery, also included "There be dragons". That said, we cannot but note the generally positive set of metaphors in all five Church documents referred to. What interests me as I read through them all again, though, is evidence of a shift in understanding, not a volte face. What Pope Benedict is now saying is different from what Archbishop Foley was saying in 2002 (since it is his name which is attached to the two ’Internet’ documents), but finds its basis in them.

The two earlier documents are more closely tied to the ’cyberspace’ metaphor, evident in phrases such as: "a chattering planet nestled in the providential silence of space" (Ethics in Internet), and the more direct reference to cyberspace as such in "lead people from cyberspace to true community" (Church and Internet). We might suspect a notion of cyberspace that sees it as empty and separate (silence of space in contrast to chattering planet, leading people from....to...). Fortunately the Church, even if it is largely uninterested in the phenomenon of Second Life, has at no point insisted on a doctrine of terra nullius in its regard, a Roman "no man’s land" notion that has provided its fair share of headaches in the post-colonial era. If we take the two earlier documents as a whole, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that its authors in fact did not understand their metaphor in terms of void and emptiness. They refer to the "world of cyberspace", an "internet audience", even introducing a touch of Alice in Wonderland in reverse at one point: "the Internet is a door opening onto a glamorous and exciting world" (Church and Internet). Ethics in Internet provides the phrase, however, that one suspects helped lead Pope Benedict to his "digital continent" by referring to the "marvellous land of cyberspace", and its "transnational boundary-bridging character". All in all, then, the Church’s notion of cyberspace at that point was neither empty nor separate.

What has changed from 2009-2011 in the three Papal Messages? Well, one thing is the way the term ’digital’ is used. In the earlier documents it was tied inexorably to ’divide’, as if that was what digital was all about. By the time of Pope Benedict’s messages, ’digital’ is much more nuanced. To begin with he introduced the neologism "digital continent". There are "digital technologies", a "digital world", a "digital generation"; there is "digital communication", a "digital arena" and, significantly, "the vocabulary of the new digital networks" (all taken from the 2009 Message). In the 2010 Message he adds a "digital marketplace", speaks of the "digital age", and by 2011 of a "public digital forum", and our "digital profile"  [ All documents referred to are available from http://www.vatican.va].  Of course there is much more involved than only the spatial metaphor - there are metaphors of growth, home, transport and so on, but here we cannot undertake a fully-fledged study of such a range of important documents. What we need to do at this point is ask ourselves if this was all that was going on, a broadening of reference of the digital.

Considerably more has been going on, I would contend, that is important for our own understanding. This is Magisterium after all, authoritative, though of course not infallible, teaching. We could get caught up easily enough in debate, including ethical debate, about whether the Internet is a place of more freedom and less control, or vice versa. But the Church, even in Ethics in Internet does not get caught up in that debate. Given the presentation of cyberspace and, later, digital world/continent, as being quite connected with physical space, we could accept that the Church is really interested in what kind of space we are actually living in - which includes cyberspace or digital continent space. That is a healthy point of view which can help free us from Utopian tendencies on the one hand and from viewing the Internet as the Whore of Babylon on the other. Yet there is still more happening in the metaphorical shift: the Pope raises the issue of the vocabulary of the new digital networks. There is more to space than ’cyber’ and ’digital’. There is also the question of social networks.

In other words, for Pope Benedict this digital space is much more like the space we experience; it is embodied space, and when space is seen that way it encourages all kinds of very real questions. In fact the Pope asks at least one of them: ""Who is my ’neighbour’?". This is a profoundly important question for the Christian today who is regularly online, and decidedly ’down to earth’. Not that we want a list of Internet sins as such, but we might want a list of Internet saving actions! In this regard the ’stickyjesus’ website is interesting:

     An action plan for extending compassion online:

     * Ask the Holy Spirit to lead you in exactly how to respond to others online. Does this situation require you to take an extra, more personal step.

     * Own and respond to the prayer requests you see. Let someone know when you pray for him or her.

     * Be empathetic to others’ suffering, grief, or fears, even if you can’t relate personally. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you.

     * Keep a prayer journal on hand to keep track of who you are praying for online, their requests and their names. Be sure to follow up. A number of free online prayer journals also exist. Just Google “online prayer journal,” and take your pick.

     * Listen and be willing to go deeper into others’ lives; ask them questions to prompt meaningful sharing. Use open-ended questions, the ones that start with “What” or “How.” Say to others, “Tell me more.”

     * Let people know when you can personally relate to their storm and how you made it to the other side.

     Expand the list, what else can you do to extend compassion online?

     Confidently live faith in the digital world.

 [ http://stickyjesus.com/2010/11/compassion]

Extending compassion online is the kind of thing that responds to Benedict’s comment that "God’s loving care for all people in Christ must be expressed in the digital world not simply as an artifact from the past, or a learned theory, but as something concrete, present and engaging" (2010). Another issue alluded to in the Papal Messages is what has been called ’absent presence’. Try running a meeting where every participant is also connected to the Internet (most meetings nowadays?) and note the multitasking, half-hearted participation that ensures in some cases, or the disconnectedness with ones physically present fellows once the mobile rings. Questions relating to this experience are asked in the 2010 World Communications Day Message: "Does the danger exist that we may be less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life? Is there is a risk of being more distracted because our attention is fragmented and absorbed in a world “other” than the one in which we live? Do we have time to reflect critically on our choices and to foster human relationships which are truly deep and lasting?".

Before concluding this chapter so we can take up our pack again and move towards the heights of holiness, we could benefit from a brief look at what ’networked space’ means for us today. Recall that in the 2009 Message, the Pope spoke of the "vocabulary of the new digital networks". He did not raise the question of the dynamics of these networks as they involve human beings who are part of them, but he must surely be interested in this too, if he were to consider the question. He must also be aware, when speaking of a "public digital forum", that this is partly metaphorical in nature, that a digital forum would not be the same as a forum involving physical space. In fact in his 2010 Message he likens this space to the Court of the Gentiles in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. Just as the physical and virtual space might be connected but are not the same, so too when we speak of networks. We need to understand how human networks, although connected metaphorically with digital networks, might differ. Recently I happened upon Six Degrees, by Duncan J. Watts [ Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees, The science of a Connected Age, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York, 2003],  an interesting study of the dynamics that are part of human networks. We can let Watts be our guide for this.

Scientists have long been interested in a question they have not had a good answer for: how does individual human behaviour aggregate to collective behaviour? At what point does something seem to change, radically, where just one more action by one more individual (or is it a complex set of actions by more than one) causes an entire transformation to occur? In scientific terms, we might ask what it is that causes a liquid, raw egg to change into a solid, edible and delectable boiled egg. In terms of human groups we might want to ask at what moment the activity of an individual or group suddenly cascades into a unified mass activity that begins to change the world. Do we know, can we know how things function in this manner, or more importantly, could we actually control this kind of activity to ensure that it took place?

We may need to look at what scientists call ’synchrony’. Have you ever been to a concert where a few people begin to clap, then all of a sudden (but at what particular moment? Who causes it, actually?) everyone begins to clap in unison? Calling this synergy is not good enough. This is how revolutions take place, after all! Especially of the ’velvet’ kind! We need to look at this, especially if we are forming young protagonists (catalysts) to transform society.

Have you heard of the small world hypothesis? Ever met someone briefly who knows a friend of a friend? Ever benefited from that? We all have. In 1967 Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, gave the ’small world’ hypothesis some scientific respectability. He claimed that given our circle of immediate friends, in just six steps away from that (friends of our friends, of their friends in turn), we can connect with everyone on the planet. It’s a small world! The question then is: What would it take for any world, including ’our world’ (here you can substitute your group, Church, Congregation), to be small in this sense?

We know that not every link in our social structure is a strong one. Social scientists now believe that not everything depends on the evident strong ties. Indeed, when groups cluster around something, and there are different clusters in different places, it simply needs the weakest tie to have a link with another weak tie in another cluster for something to happen. And here is a factor that might be disconcerting for hierarchy: coherent global activity often emerges from the interaction of peers without, and one might also say ’despite’, central global authority.

"Birds of a feather stick together", we say in English, and no doubt other languages have their way of saying this too. Social scientists call it homophily. There is a human tendency for like to associate with like. But is this based on only one dimension (say geography) or more? The discovery seems to be that if it can be based on more than one dimension, homophily greatly increases our capacity to influence the world.

We have followed the upheaval in the Middle East over an extended period. We have followed news analysis with repeated reference to “youth”, “connected”, “Facebook”, “networks”, “Internet”, “revolution”. Behind this are more profound attempts to understand what has been going on in terms of network science, such as the political analyst who said: "The cascading impact of social protest in Tunisia and Egypt, triggered by desperate citizens and enabled by digital media, needs a new kind of response”  [Philip Howard, Digital origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, Oxford University Press, 2010],  a comment alluding to what network scientists call ’information cascades’, or even the hint in the International Herald Tribune early in the Egypt crisis long before Mubarak capitulated saying, “The uprising, which began as a spontaneous grass-roots movement, appeared to coalesce, at least for the moment....”  [ International Herald Tribune, January 31, 2011].

Network scientists are aware that people networks are not the same as computer networks, and that the spread of disease is not the same as the spread of ideas, but that the combination of ’digital’ and ’democracy’ (or dictatorship too for that matter) is powerful. The question is "why?". Maybe it can be understood, and used for good. Is what is happening in the Middle East today essentially different from what happened some 2,000 years ago? Network science would suggest that we explore the similarities, but not put them down to something as simple as the power of ideas, be they about Christianity or Democracy. It suggests we would come closer to understanding the phenomenon if we could name certain people, be they Jesus, Mohamed or Buddha, X, Y, or Z, and a handful of followers. (Emphasis on the handful).

At a certain point, individuals can stop behaving like individuals and coalesce, act as a coherent mass. If we could identify at what point this is likely to happen, we would have made some progress. One concept is that of ’bounded reason’, i.e. it is not a purely rational or mathematical phenomenon, as we have already seen with the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking. One clear aspect has been identified in people networks: paying attention to peers is a strategy for surviving in a confused world. This is already an advance in our thinking. The value of testimony and example are often presented as ’religious’ values, as if this were all they might be, but network scientists believe they apply quite forcefully in all people networks. We assume others know something we do not, and can act with them on that basis. But when might we be prepared to do that? Apparently independent choices can become bound together. There are hints of an answer to when this can happen.

Studies suggest that it does not take many people. It is the kind of people and kind of cell they form that matters. There appears to be a ’threshold rule’, a point at which someone capitulates and follows so that the group begins to make decisions for collective behaviour. But human beings seem to want to do so only if they can argue that it is still ’their’ decision. And it would seem that small groups are the key to this.

In other words network theory is able to support what we have known from sociology, but in fresh and interesting ways. It leaves us with a tantalising question: How might we ’seed’ a revolution? It will be up to ’innovators’, ’early adopters’ and a few friends.

Networks are all very well and good, but the Church and its many internal structures and groups are more often than not hierarchical. Do the two ideas come into conflict? Not necessarily. In fact, and this is one key practical point to make, they can help one another! Hierarchies perform badly under conditions of failure, and they are vulnerable to congestion and ambiguity. The first thing to admit is that even a physical network like the Internet has a hierarchy. There is a ’backbone’ of hubs, there are many layers, and then it comes down to the individual user. So let’s not think of a ’pure’ network. It probably does not exist. Studies, though, on how to help a hierarchy to work more effectively in a networked way have come up with a remarkably effective local solution that can then be applied at every level of the organisation.

If the ’local’ individual who is often sending the most messages to the ’top’ works closely with another individual who receives lots of messages from the ’top’, this achieves many good results, including reducing ambiguity generally (problems are solved locally), reducing congestion across the entire organisation, and increasing the capacity of individuals to work together. It is called, in network organisational theory, ’multiscale connectivity’ and is regarded as a super-robust approach in any organisation. It means giving much greater power to teams and encouraging people to use internal as well as external social networks to resolve problems.

At the beginning of this chapter we paused to take a look at our maps. We have been engrossed in them for quite some time! But hopefully we are better equipped now to move on, having realised that while it is a map of the territory we wish to trek, the map and the territory are not the same thing. Lewis Carroll once made the point humorously with a description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile"  [ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893, but now available online at http://www.archive.org/details/sylviebrunoconcl00carriala].  A character in the book noted some practical difficulties with such a map and stated that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well". So let’s move on with that thought in mind.

4 Spirituality: In, Out and All Around

Summary

While maintaining the importance of keeping God as the focus in our lives, and employing asects of the via negativa in our spirituality, we remind ourselves of the importance of both ’looking’ and ’hearing’ in the digital continent, as ways of acknowledging Christ’s presence. A spirituality in this new ’space’ needs to be incarnational and public, especially for consecrated persons. We revisit a preliterate spirituality to learn how, in a time of ’secondary orality’ (Walter Ong SJ) we can rethink our understanding of word, and listen for answers.

Stripping our mind of delusions about God is known, in traditional spirituality, as the via negativa. It is a form of journeying inward beyond all creation competitors. When it comes to spirituality in the digital continent, we need to take a look at what this means, since the creation competitors are pretty much evident. As such it would seem to contain a prejudice against image and representation - in which case there is but one approach of a practical kind: digital detox, unplug! But if a digital native is reading this, he or she does not ’use’ media - he or she inhabits media, and for that matter, this is almost certainly the reality for the rest of us whether we are conscious of it or not. So the digital via negativa might be a bit like those exercises where young people sleep out on the street for a night without the usual comforts, in order to get into the shoes of the poor (or maybe just get into the feel, since many of the poor don’t even have shoes). Unplugging, digital detox can be useful, but they are not equivalent to the via negativa. If Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross gave the via negativa respectability, we should not forget that for ten centuries before them, spirituality was also respectable - and dependent on images! My hunch is that today, with the return to an earlier orality, we can rehabilitate image and still practise via negativa.

We are very used to images coming at us from the outside. It may help, naturally, to reduce and be selective from a spiritual point of view, but we can certainly allow the starting point for spiritual depth to be an ’outside’ image, so long as we admit that it is merely a tool, and that the inside image from our own lives will be the real revelation. True Christian spirituality is going to have to lead us to Christ, one way or another. Today’s digital native can start with the outer images but must, eventually, find the inner one which will be less ’image’ in the sense of seeing something and more symbol in the sense of feeling, internally ’hearing’, and experiencing something: the presence of Christ within us.

In what follows I suggest a range of different approaches, each acknowledging an outer image to begin with, but inviting us inward - using the digital environment which is the inevitable ground of our spirituality today. We can unplug the ’figures’, but we cannot unplug the ’ground’.

Let’s start with a probe from McLuhan, a kind of spiritual electric jolt, if you like:

In a certain way, I also think that this could be the time of the Antichrist. When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer’s moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer. Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favourable to an Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be tuned to a ’new Christ’ and mistake him for the real Christ  [ "Tomorrow’s Church: Fourth Conversation with Pierre Babin", in McLuhan, M. The Medium and the Light: Reflections on religion. Gingko Press; First Printing edition, May 2002].

So it is the real Christ we are looking for. Interestingly enough the same McLuhan, in conversations with Pierre Babin about liturgy and media, saw ’electricity’ almost as an experience of transcendence when he remarked:

We want everything to happen at once, all the richness, all the feasts, all the Scriptures together and instantly. It is the same thing as having Christ right here in person. Electricity tends to evoke the presence of Christ immediately via the ear. [bid].

The presence of Christ immediately, via the ear? That is an evocative idea and possibly one to exploit from a liturgical point of view. But for the moment, let’s work with the ’Lucifer’ image! We can let C.S. Lewis help us with this.

Screwtape is a senior devil in the "lowerarchy of our Father below", writing to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter on earth, working on a "patient"  [ References in quotation marks here are all from my by now very battered Fontana Books edition of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters first published 1942]. My edition was the seventh impression in 1960. I could not think of a better way to launch into some ideas on spirituality in the digital continent!

     My dear Wormwood,

     So you "have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away", have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put          old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

     Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our          Father to withdraw his support from him). As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be           directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to               constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

Screwtape, at the close of his letter to Wormwood, says, “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our             Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys”. The           relationship between our physical reality and our divine destiny is demonstrated in this daily decision. The spiritual life involves the constant effort to allow the         sometimes arid knowledge of the glorious promise to immediately and continually inform our wilful decision to take the first step.

So spirituality, if we consider just the above, is something for the in between times, after we have taken the first step and before we reach the glorious promise,         and while it is likely to be filled with troughs and peaks it is not and cannot be a half-hearted affair. It is all or nothing. What I like about C.S. Lewis is his                     consecrated imagination. When Lewis used the expression ’baptized imagination’ he had in mind a washing, or perhaps we might say a soaking as happens           when rain falls gently over time, in his case reading, and then writing, uplifting stories which convinced not by force of argument but by the way they gradually           seeped into and washed the unconscious clean with thoughts of transcendence and beauty. The ’outside’ action, washing with water, opens to consecration,         which is God at work within us. The document on consecrated life already referred to, Vita Consecrata puts it this way:

It is the duty of the consecrated life to show that the Incarnate Son of God is the eschatological goal towards which all things tend, the splendour before which every other light pales, and the infinite beauty which alone can fully satisfy the human heart. [op. cit., no. 16]

Screwtape would have shuddered at the thought. His response?:

He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least - sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us.

Screwtape Letters which, incidentally, Lewis found unpleasant to write since he was laying into profound spiritual problems but from the devil’s perspective, nevertheless tells us that despite or even as part of the "law of Undulation", the "patient" wins out. Says Screwtape to Wormwood in the final letter: "This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man"!

Lewis’s indicators can help us be clearer about what a Christian spirituality is, including in our digital context: eternal salvation continues to be our greatest moral task and a struggle that so many of our day-to-day problems can divert us from. The devil would like to keep a person’s mind focused on inner life and feelings, to promote self-absorption and selfishness, ignore today and worry about the future, and discourage a person from seeking simple God-given pleasures. Lewis encourages us to live each day to the fullest, to be concerned about only each day’s bread, and to remember those lilies of the field that sway so beautifully and remain so protected. Simple pleasures like taking a walk, tea-time or coffee break, reading or re-reading a book, having a pint in a pub were staples in Lewis’s life and he encouraged others to find activities like this; today we would add some more. Lewis is very much alive to the incarnational aspect of it all - the Word made flesh. It is such a context as this, including the delightful, whimsical, imaginative humour of it all, the story, that positions us to include the digital continent which, of course, Lewis could not have imagined, in our appreciation of Christian spirituality.

The via negativa might lead us on an inward journey, but it must also lead us out again. Ours is not a merely inward spirituality. In fact our spirituality needs to be in, out and all around. Consecrated persons are not secret, inner Christians, but outward and public ones, especially when one considers that consecration is made public by vows or sacred bonds by which a person commits him or herself and which are accepted in the name of the Church. An intense spirituality, life according to the Spirit, is not merely inward; it will be an ecclesial and communitarian striving for holiness for which Vita Consecrata was able to say that members of consecrated life are "experts in communion"  [ Ibid no. 92].  The digital continent affects us today inwardly, outwardly, and is also our environment. It needs to be part of the equation of spirituality.

In, out, and all around - ever gone rabbit-hunting? Today, with ’wild’ creatures almost absent from terra firma, and increasingly absent from our oceans, few may have the opportunity of chasing down a rabbit, and perhaps we have become so ecologically sensitive that we may not even want to! Do note, however, that I have merely referred to the sport of chasing one down. Once one succeeds, one can always let the little fellow go! Besides, one needs lots of space, but I remember as a young lad having a friend who could infallibly catch a rabbit on the run! Apart from the extraordinary agility one needs to change direction there is the fact that a rabbit has almost 360 degree vision! The clue is the ’almost’. With eyes on either side of its head, it means if you can see an eye it can see you! There are but two spots where the rabbit can’t see you - right in front and right behind! That said, the rabbit doesn’t see very well at the best of times, but it certainly knows when a human is around - it has more than eyes to rely on!

Given where we have come from on our trek thus far, it ought be no surprise that our discussion of spirituality is going to suggest, not chasing rabbits but at least a realisation that spirituality in the digital continent is more like a 360 degree situation than a linear exercise with a beginning, middle and end. Given ’acoustic space’, in McLuhan’s understanding of that term, spirituality in this continent is going to be much more like a natural environment with lots of centres and no margins. In fact, we need to leave the eye aside for a while. Still having trouble with the idea of ’acoustic’ space? Try looking behind you without turning around - now you are in acoustic space! We can encounter God there too.

Let’s consider how the return to an oral culture influences our spirituality. Walter Ong says that it is in fact ’secondary orality’, like primary, preliterate orality but now dependent on the written and printed word from which we have come, therefore different. Today’s digital culture has this character of secondary orality about it. One religious manifestation of that is how we are encouraged to take up Lectio divina again, which is a more complex way of pondering God’s word than straightforward reading of a text. Lectio divina was regular practice in monasteries by the 6th century but it was, already by that time, based on the written word. It is hard for us to imagine a world without writing, so we need to practise getting there in our imagination.

A very good exercise for this is to take a short Gospel passage such as the baptism of Jesus in Mark 1:10-11. Learn it by head, heart and gut! That means asking a series of questions of the passage, which runs like this:

It was at this time that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptised in the Jordan by John.
No sooner had he come up out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, ’You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you.
Immediately afterwards the Spirit drive him out into the wilderness and he remained there for forty days, and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him.

Mark’s story was conceived as sounds, even though at some point it was committed to writing. He/his community assumed it would be told by the human voice, but when it was written down the purpose was to record the sounds in the only medium available other than telling it viva voce.

We will lose something by not doing it in Greek because we must assume that certain words and sounds would have been chosen in that language by the author of the passage, but that should not prevent us from tackling the exercise in our own language. We need to get the sounds into us. Walter Ong calls this ’interiorization’. Think head, heart and gut. Head for words and ideas, heart for emotions and gut for action. Pace is going to be important here - some parts may need to be slower than others, or at least combined with a pause. There are several episodes involved: Jesus came from Nazareth, he was baptised, something happened during and after. He is finally driven out into the wilderness. Each episode has a descriptive word, then what Jesus heard and saw; there are gestures, mostly implicit: rising, looking up, tearing, down, driving out; and just as implicitly, we are being told this story by an ’imagination’ that allows us to hear and see as Jesus did. Think of, and react to, move to, if you like, each of the elements: baptism, dove, voice, wilderness, beasts, angels.

Anyone who takes the trouble to do this can never think of this brief passage in the same way again. We have got into its skin, so to speak. This is at least a clue to an aspect of spirituality in the digital continent, where we are invited to ’enter in’ rather than stand back and analyse.

We could move on, chronologically speaking, just a few centuries later, when individuals were following in Jesus’ way by living in the desert as hermits, then gradually gathered in cenobitic groups, forming community, even if much of the time was spent alone. The early Christian monks drew deeply on the resonance provided by an ancient oral culture. This gave them extraordinary sensitivity to the power of language. Words did not acquire meaning from a dictionary but from the word’s very habitat, and from the consequences of those words:

Some brothers...went to see Abba Felix and they begged him to say a word to them. But the old man kept silence. After they had asked for a long time he said to them, "You wish to hear a word?" They said, "Yes, Abba". Then the old man said to them, "There are no more words nowadays. When the brothers used to consult the old men and when they did what was said to them, God showed them how to speak. But now since they ask without doing that which they hear, God has withdrawn the grace of the word from the old men and they do not find anything to say, since there are no longer any who carry their words out". Hearing this the brothers groaned, saying, "Pray for us abba". [V]  [V] Benedicta Ward, trans., The Desert Christian, New York, MacMillan, 1975, p. 242.

Note the connection between word and life here. We are meant to enter into relationship with what the words are telling us and follow these words with our lives. Now, there are many words today just as there were many words then, but because we have learned to control almost everything today we may think we can control words too. Spirituality in the digital continent includes a strong invitation to rethink words more humbly, how we use them, and in fact to use them in different ways. It may include too a real custodianship of words, just as we once spoke of the custody of the eyes (which still obtains, by the way, also and especially in the digital continent!) This is one of the things that made McLuhan so interesting and at the same time baffling; he was consciously, deliberately modelling what he believed we should be doing - setting a word against its complex background so we would be more aware of that background. Sometimes he did it through puns and witty subtitles, at other times with oxymorons. ’Global village’ is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. If something is global it is not a village, and vice versa - but look at what an effect that simple expression has had! The invitation in the 44th World Communications Day Message was for priests to rethink words too, how they are to be a voice in the digital marketplace:

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace

 [ Pope Benedict XVI, 44th World Communications Day Message, 2010]

We could interpret this as an invitation not to fill digital space with words but, like Abba Felix asks, to follow words with our lives, our willingness to seek transforming knowledge, lead others to truthful knowing.

Our digital world is filled with more than words. If we can be allowed just one more quote from Screwtape, possibly the strongest worded section in the entire collection of letters, we may find food for thought:

Music and silence - how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell - though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express - no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise - Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile - Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress. meanwhile, you, disgusting little... [ Here the MS breaks off and is resumed in a different hand. ]

If what we say and what we see shapes our souls, then what we hear does too. Thomas Merton tells us that the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, played Mozart’s music every morning:

"Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart," Merton said. In the dream, Barth had been appointed to examine Mozart on his theology, and he was trying to make things easy for him. But Mozart did not answer. Merton felt that Barth’s dream was about Barth’s salvation, and that Barth felt he would be saved more by the Mozart in himself than by theology. "Each day, for years," Merton wrote, "Barth played Mozart every morning before going to work on his dogma, unconsciously seeking to awaken, perhaps, the hidden sophianic Mozart in himself, the central wisdom that comes with the divine and cosmic music and is saved by love... "Fear not, Karl Barth," Merton continued. "Trust in the divine mercy...Your books and mine matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation". [X]  [X] William James Knight, The Thomas Merton we Knew, http://www.therealmerton.com/tommie5.html

The demonic and not the spiritual thrives in what Screwtape called "the stream of immediate sensate experiences" not because there is anything wrong with sensate experiences, in fact quite the contrary. What Screwtape wanted Wormwood to do with his "patient" was to "teach him to call it ’real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ’real’". In that kind of stream we will only find distraction, not God.

Healthy noise, beautiful sounds (leaving the individual to determine what is beautiful, of course), and silence are all part of acoustic space which, recall, is not just about sound. Walter Ong weighs in on this issue too, when, in his Orality and Literacy, he indicates that for him sound is a unifying sense whereas sight is a dissecting one. For him, hearing connotes presence: "He is speaking therefore He is here", by contrast with, say reading which connotes absence - He is not here so He has written!

By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together. Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness.

 [Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, Routledge, 2002]

The serious spiritual questions, when it comes to things like the World Wide Web, Internet, software, the digital generally speaking have little to do with the tools or instruments themselves, and the at times mind-boggling things they seem to be able to do. The questions are not even about ’religion and the Internet’, if that means how the Church is using Internet, or the fact that after sex, religion is the most searched for topic on Google. Much of what we think about under the kinds of headings just listed involve our reaction to media rather than our conscious grasp of what media is doing to us. The serious issues include the ways that human beings determine digital things, the way in which someone programs them, because the formal cause lies in there somewhere. If we are surrounded by and profoundly influenced by, including unconsciously, the digital then we need to understand that it does not come value-free. But whose values? We have to be ’savvy’, and this includes being spiritually savvy. Clarity about our values in the first place, and the ability to know or find out if this software, that programme, the use of this or that gadget will foster these values or work against them has to be part of today’s spiritual quest for today’s consecrated person. Another serious spiritual issue in the digital continent is being able to ’listen’ rather than ’look’ for answers, to be able to tune in to the frequency, so to speak.

So if we need to follow our words with our lives, get a 360 degree appreciation of the environment in which we wish to live spiritually, it is going to mean taking a look at one of the most important features of the digital continent - software! Hopefully we have left well behind by now the notion that software is that exciting, plastic-wrapped something ’new’ which we can insert in one of our machines. it has long ceased to be that (we always download it now) and it never was just that. Software is what makes the digital world go round. and it does not just happen. Human beings write it. We would do well to understand something of that. But the even more difficult side of the same question is understanding the deeper code of the digital medium or to put it simply, "we shape our tools and our tools shape us".

Before moving on to questions of code, software and the like, I would like to round off these ideas on spirituality in today’s digital continent, with some ideas from an outstanding communicator over the years, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. His Pastoral Programmes for the Archdiocese of Milan in the late 1980s were summed up in his Pastoral letter for 1990, "Ephata, Be Opened!"  [Carlo Martini, Communicating Christ to the world. The Pastoral letters: "Ephata, Be Opened!", "The Hem of His Garment", and "Letters to a Family about TV". Manila, Claretians 1996. Kansas City, Sheed and Ward, 1994].  It is as relevant to us today as it was to his people then.

The Pastoral Programme for 1990 is based on the passage from Mark’s Gospel, the healing of the deaf man. Here is the passage:

Returning from the district of Tyre, he went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, right through the Decapolis region.
And they brought him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they asked him to lay his hands on him.
He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, put his fingers into the man’s ears and touched his tongue with spittle. Then looking up to heaven he sighed, and he said to him, ’Ephphatha’, that is, ’Be opened’. And his ears were opened, and the ligament of his tongue was loosened and he spoke clearly.
And Jesus ordered them to tell no one about it, but the more he insisted, the more widely they published it.
Their admiration was unbounded. ’He has done all things well,’ they said ’he makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak’.

We will find the passage - and if not the whole passage, at least the symbols therein, in the Rite of Baptism. Martini considers the passage apt for us today, though, because of the struggle we find, despite all our means, to communicate with God and with one another. Throughout the letter Martini has us ’see’, ’listen’ then ’act’. He has us see and imagine on the basis of what we see in fact, that we are often lonely in the crowd, not by contemplative choice but by inability to communicate well and he asks if the logic of mass communication - he was thinking more of TV and radio than Internet, which he hardly knew of at that stage - "tend to shape and render our very interpersonal communication more difficult". He tries to go to the cultural roots of the phenomenon. Turning back to the Gospel passage he reminds us that Jesus, who makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak, comes to us as a teacher of communication. He then goes on to demonstrate how God communicates himself and makes us capable of communication: this is a direct invitation to listening, contemplating the self-communicating God. The icon he leaves us with is Mary, the Virgin of annunciation, (the spiritual dimension), visitation (the anthropological dimension), and ’magnificat’ (the critical-prophetic dimension).

The third and final part of the letter is about action. Without going into all its details, we immediately see how it can help our efforts at spirituality in the digital continent in a practical way. It begins with an examination of conscience, 16 questions, but not of the usual kind. He asks us, for example, if we are able to read the Bible as the book of God’s communication. Is there any Gospel passage which speaks to us of Jesus’ communicative power for us? He also wants to know if we can feel something of the evangelising passion of Jesus and his disciples. Then, re-reading five years of pastoral programmes, he outlines a range of actions and reflections:

All communication begins from silence - not empty silence, but the ’contemplative dimension of life’ which is filled with contemplation of the wonders accomplished by God. Here he points to the value of monastic or enclosed communities in society, as places for ’recharging’, as oases of silence, and points which radiate prayer - do we profit from the existence of these in some way?

Communication in and of the Word, where we listen as believers.

Communication in Eucharist, Liturgy, the Sacraments. * Communicating the Gospel through evangelisation, catechesis, fraternal dialogue, homilies...

Communication in charity. In particular he focuses on the ’brief messages’ not the long official ones! He did not know Twitter, but it now becomes relevant to this idea.

Techniques involving non-verbal communication in faith (body position in prayer, silences); song and music which exists between non-verbal and verbal; ’being there’ - presence as a form of communication; symbolic language which is able to respect difference and distance.

If we return to the image this book opens with, Bilbo on his epic journey ’there and back again’, I believe we could easily work in the above pointers if we wanted to imagine a more spiritual Hobbit! Tolkien, recall, was not concerned about slavishly tying his avowedly Catholic imagination to formalised Christian theology, but he would have been happy if it encouraged others to see the connections.

5 Soft Pause in medias res

Summary

’Digital’ is a helpful term so long as we keep it as an attribute rather than suggest it is constitutive of things. Software is not just a superficial element today but a layer that permeates most levels of contemporary life and activity. Strange that it is so often left out of serious reflection, then. We need to think ’faithfully’ about software and other digital matters. Again recalling our media ecology approach it is possible to see how to integrate these reflections in many aspects of theological thinking.

We have come to a crossroads on our trek, time for a soft pause in medias res! A soft pause is something the android does - the phone, not the hobbit - when it pauses from dialing for a moment, and then goes on; and in medias res is a literary description for a narrative that does not begin at the beginning, but plunges into the heart of the story. But what is ’soft’? And where is the heart of the story? Forgive a little word play here - we will be dealing with software, and things, but not just any ’thing’. We really are at the heart of bodily existence here, our very ’thinginess’; we are in medias res. But first we have to deal with the digital. Is it ’thing’? The response I will be offering is that it is thing, but not in the same way we are. We are things with bodies, beings in relationship, and that’s a big, big difference. Whatever supreme claims the digital or technology more broadly speaking might make, they are extensions of the human being made in God’s image. As Tolkien put it in his poem ’Mythopoeia’:

The heart of Man is not compound of lies,

but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,

and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,

and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,

his world-dominion by creative act: not his to worship the great Artefact,

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed.

We make still by the law in which we’re made. 

[ J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1988]

The notion of subcreation is a profitable one for us to ponder during our soft pause.

We have accepted the compound idea of ’digital continent’ thus far without quibble, acknowledging that it has at least brought a human experience back to earth. This word ’digital’, though, is somewhat elusive, and we cannot simply go on without asking ourselves some questions about it, apart from its technical understanding as a series of 0s and 1s, ons and offs, bits. We have already seen the growth in its application within the discourse of a single Pope! So if so many things can be described as ’digital’, is it possible that our very existence might be described this way?

Many of those who say it can be call themselves digital ontologists and believe we can reduce everything to bits; every ’it’ is a ’bit’, including us! But they seem to be overlooking several things here. One is the difference between predicative and attributive use of an adjective. Pope Benedict, using the term ’digital continent’, might be suggesting that there is something spatial about our experience - an experience of a particular kind enshrined in the word ’continent’ (whatever that means - see further on) which has been referred to as ’digital’. He is not however attributing digitality to the very nature of space, the world, the universe and its inhabitants, as if we are intrinsically digital. The other overlooked element is the theological side of metaphysics which goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle. Plato may have believed very much in the abstract thinking involved in geometry and arithmetic and their importance in grasping something of the nature of being, but in the end he saw these concepts as located in some transcendent place beyond us. Aristotle too saw the divine quality which we can but glimpse through knowing something of ourselves. Descartes however saw everything controllable by rules, mathematical variables, so ultimately measurable, and this seems to have led moderns to believe they can control everything. Being is cast in a mathematical mould, and in particular by now a mould measured in 0s and 1s. Whether we like it or not we are gradually caught up in the digitisation of the world.

We do not want this to get too heavy, but it is important to know precisely where we are in this digital continent. The digitisation of the world is ongoing and it has the potential to present itself as if it is the world. At that point we become digital determinists. God, faith in one another too, for that matter, have little place in that kind of world. So let’s establish something clearly for ourselves - all of our interest in the digital will remain predicative, not attributive. Once that is accepted we can deal with the digital with some sense of distance.

And now we can take up the question of software, and still be allowed to suggest that software is of fundamental significance for bodily beings like ourselves. Think for a moment of the implications of software. Would there be any academic exercise undertaken today without it? One doubts it - after all the mediation of code is inevitable for just about every academic kind of practice: word processing, email, TCP/IP protocols, just to name several things involved. Or try ordinary living without the mediation of software in pretty much any part of the world today. It would mean not appearing in government databases, not using normal utilities, water and electricity, not using the a whole range of appliances that rely on digital code to control functions, not watching television, reading a newspaper, avoiding all manner of everyday activities that involve barcodes and, increasingly, QR codes, not using credit cards, not even travelling anywhere by car. In fact city-dwellers would need to stay at home to avoid various forms of digital surveillance in operation in the city.

Software can be obvious inasmuch as it might be a program with a name, or it might be quite invisible because embedded in something, and today more and more it is embedded. Oddly, though, software in itself is quite immaterial, a ’digital being’ made up of 0s and 1s. It is not visible in this sense; we can merely see its representation if we write down instructions which are then turned into machine code and read by the machine. There can be all kinds of traps for us in understanding what software is because we can easily mistake it for its effects rather than for what it is: Google is software, but we think of it as a ’search engine’ and that makes it seem more solid; we may be less aware of the ’Google effect’, what it is doing to our memory. Software is not the interface; the interface serves to separate us from the algorithms going on behind. Our sense of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) is in fact false, something that becomes clearer when we use other kinds of software such as LyX, a document processor which instead relies on WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean).

Software lies behind so many understandings and processes in society today - economics, politics, law, military activity, transport are all software bound. It is helpful to note the titles of any number of studies involving software from different perspectives to get a feel for its importance in society quite apart from what it actually does in functional terms: Software Takes Command  [Lev Manovich Software Takes Command, http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html], a book Lev Manovich released as a ’soft book’ meaning he thinks of it as software itself, patched from time to time; Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture and Imagination,, a look at executable code over the centuries as it has linked to art, language, technology, philosophy and religion, to the extent that all of these are inscribed in various ways in software today; Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace [ Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Book, 1999, also available as an update book under another title CodeV2.0 and available from https://www.socialtext.net/codev2/ ] which looks at regulation on the Net; Programmed Visions: Software and Memory  [Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, MIT Press, 2011], which looks at how programming has ’hardened’ into software and memory into storage; Software Studies: A Lexicon, [E]  [E] Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon, MIT Press 2008 a field guide to the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impact of software.

When Cardinal Hummes indicated that he thought it possible, even desirable for technology manuals to be studied in seminaries alongside the Summa, we realise he was simply making a point about the importance of understanding the impact of software today for everyone, hence important too for the candidate to priesthood. Not too much actual study of the Summa goes on in seminaries I know of - and I hope software manuals are left where they belong, certainly not in the seminary classroom. But other reading of the kind indicated above would be desirable. Manovich at one point says:

I think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can’t be complete until we consider this software layer. Which means that all disciplines which deal with contemporary society and culture – architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political science, humanities, science and technology studies, and so on – need to account for the role of software and its effects in whatever subjects they investigate.

 [Manovich, op.cit. (hard to give a ’page number’ given its manner of presentation - but it is searchable!)]

Note that he has left religion out of the list; religion has been forgotten or reduced to ’and so on’ rather than consciously eliminated, in the Cartesian mindset as we have it today, but we need to put it back in there explicitly! This does not mean the study of software from a technical angle, though it would also be helpful to ensure that a basic literacy is involved, not in how to use software, but how to write it, or fix it, or fiddle with it to the extent that the software allows us to - and it should. This ’and it should’ indicates another perspective that needs to be part of study: the question of how code is interpreted and implemented. If all we ever know is machine code, we are left helpless. We need to see and understand something of source code because it is humanly readable.

The questions that digital tools raise have a place in philosophical and theological studies, and not only in moral philosophy and theology. For example, communication proper is a human affair, but it has long been transferred to ’digital being’ and its form of control, so the question ’What is communication in the global digital network’ is an important one. Is it for human benefit, or is it but an outpouring of the way we see the digital with all its speed and efficiency? Michael Eldred, an Australian philosopher, puts it this way:

Human being finds itself always already attuned with the world in one mood/mode or another and, equally primordially, it understands the world. As a plurality of human beings we are open to a world in sharing an understanding of it. We are in the clearing of the disclosure of beings as such together. Communication is the sharing in common (L. communis) of an understanding of world by articulating it in speech, spoken or written.

 [Michael Eldred, The Digital Cast of Being: Metaphysics, Mathematics, Cartesianism, Cybernetics, Capitalism, Communication http://www.arte-fact.org/dgtlon_e.html#3. Also available as an ebook from the site indicated here. It is not an easy read!]

The problem in the digital continent is that globalised communication seems to be about an averaging-out of all the possible facts in human understanding, of ’keeping in touch’ and ’keeping abreast’, little of which really touches the kind of primordial understanding about who we are and the world we inhabit that human beings put into words, poetry, music, conversation of a normal kind.

Members of consecrated life, certainly, will want to think faithfully about software and technology. Tolkien’s idea of subcreation could be a starting point. Whatever human beings do can give glory to God when done responsibly and creatively. We can think of consecrated imagination as subcreation. Probably, though, the reader is wondering if we can bring all this down to theological brass tacks. Do software or technology more broadly speaking have anything to do with theology or vice versa? Let me suggest a number of reasons why I believe the answer has to be affirmative.

Language

Words are frail things, really, to make sense of the incarnate God, but it is what we humans have and besides, we believe that the Word was made flesh. At any rate, when someone signs up in consecrated life (the ’signing up’ is almost always part of the rite, somewhere), think of what he or she signs up to: being a saint is one of them; being a teacher, preacher, pastor... according to the spirit or charism of the group we sign up within. And words. We sign up to words! We will use words lovingly to praise and proclaim, to pastor, to study, to sing. And almost certainly to write. So it follows that we should treat words lovingly, all words and especially those about God. This is not a new idea. We can go back to the Fathers of the Church and find it there:

Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary, together with attempts to search out the hidden meaning in this phrase or that syllable, but those conscious of the goal of our calling realise that we are to become like God, as far as this is possible for human nature. But we cannot become like God unless we have knowledge of God, and without lessons there will be no knowledge. Instruction begins with the proper use of speech, and syllables and words are the elements of speech. Therefore to scrutinize syllables is not a superfluous task.

 [ St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1980, p. 16.]

Software and theology are both environments, but it is not as if we are living in either one or the other; they intermingle. In fact one thing they share absolutely is language, and we might begin from this by suggesting we take another look at the way both use language. Technology today has ’colonised’ any number of discourses - including religious discourse. This sometimes happens in quite trite ways, such as the way Apple has often used words and images that evoke a religious sense, especially in its advertising, or the way ’evangelize’ is used, especially in the software industry. We do not need to waste time on this sort of thing. But we might do well to critique by now standard metaphors that we find creeping into even ’magisterial’ discourse! An example is the ’digital native’, ’digital immigrant’ dichotomy. This kind of metaphor can fix us in certain habits of thought that ought be questioned, and it is not resolved by introducing ’missionary’ either. The words ’native’, ’immigrant’ and ’missionary’ in fact, in the same piece of discourse, carry all kinds of past colonial baggage and subtly suggest other structures at work that are not helpful in today’s theological context. For that matter we should not leave ’continent’ out of our critique either, since there is not too much objectivity involved in explaining what a continent is in the first place - the concept is politically or ideologically bound, perhaps even racially so! Why is all of Europe a continent but India a subcontinent?

Inculturation

Theology can be thought of as contextual; the more favoured word in official Church documents is ’inculturation’. One certainly gains the idea from use of this latter term, especially in contemporary missiology, that it looks favourably on human experience, and so context; its perspective is that grace builds on nature, because nature is capable of being built on. But it also acknowledges the need for nature, and culture to be redeemed. If we take either perspective to its extremes we end up with a ’hard’ version of creation theology or at the other end a ’hard’ view of redemption.

This might be a parody of the older Catholic, earthy and creation-oriented and Protestant, divine and redemption-oriented theological debate, but in the real nature of things we theologise somewhere on that continuum. We will need to position ourselves in this regard - do we consider that the digital world is a grace or do we think it badly in need of redemption? Both, you say, and true too, but the issue here is the ’positioning’. If, for example, we position ourselves more towards the creation-oriented approach, we could look upon the software environment or digital culture in which we are immersed not just as a tool for mission, or as a culture which is in need of our ministrations for its conversion, but as a culture which already has ’seeds of the word’ sown in it and which can evangelise us! Is that stretching it too much?

If it is, then tackle it another way. Great theologians of the past have used current modes of thinking and current (for them) experiences out of which to theologise. That is what Augustine and Aquinas did in their own times and theologians are still doing - and hopefully can do from our digital times too. Anyone teaching theology today must realise that the students already have a great deal of digital experience which, if we follow pedagogical principles, ought be a starting point. Begin where the student is at! In an earlier work [I]  [I] Julian Fox, Hacking the Way to Heaven, Lulu.com, 2009 I was attempting to do just that, though trying to work with ’hacker’ as a metaphor has become increasingly difficult in the light of recent phone-hacking revelations - but I did say that the word was on the slippery slope and that this would probably not be arrested (no pun intended)! That should not prevent us from exploring possible metaphors originating from within the digital realm. Even just for balance sake we ought do a little colonising of our own

Delight

The idea of play and pleasure, as we experience it through software, can be productive today theologically. Screwtape’s ’Enemy’ (our Saviour) is not anti-play or anti-pleasure. C.S. Lewis was right when he emphasised the value of true simple pleasures. Christian theology can always correct the immanence of digital metaphors with the great transcendentals like the Good, the True, the Beautiful which are the divine at work in creation. We can note the way digital objects have shifted from being tools, indeed from huge, intrusive workhorses (if I recall the huge mainframe computer of my undergraduate days) to tiny toys, which is one of the main ways they become part of the environment, an environment for pleasure and entertainment. The two cultures, the digital and the theological, can be brought to bear on one another to critique one another in this sense. The digital helps us lighten up but it needs some direction given it to lead us to gravitas.

Ecclesiastical history

The study of Church history is not so surprisingly tied to the history of media, yet we do not find fully developed approaches to Church history along these lines other than the inevitable reference to the Reformation, Luther and the Printing Press. McLuhan and Ong have both demonstrated the conjunction of media developments and significant shifts in society and Church, and we would want to be alert, too, to what is happening to us today, with another shift considered to be of paradigm proportions.

Sacred texts

Think of the possibilities for the study of sacred texts today, and I mean not just the software which can successfully analyse and confirm much of scholastic intuition and effort over centuries. There are very definitely new ways of engaging adolescents with the Scriptures if we believe much of what McLuhan has said about the ’ear’, since the ear can be used to activate Scripture in ways the eye may have ceased to do for today’s adolescent. We are more aware today of the iconic capacity of language to provide direct contact with its object, so metaphor retains its value, though we may have to work hard on making sense of the confusing ecosystem of metaphor that the digital world construes. We are also aware of the bias towards ’space’ that seems intrinsic to the digital experience today, and this space has an inner quality, can be an invitation to meditation and contemplation. If we take this thinking in the direction of spirituality and mysticism, and can adequately correct the overwrought claims to secular transcendence, we may be able to prompt the question of the need for the first truly digital mystic.

Moral and other

There are simply too many issues to deal with in a paragraph or two once we have cast our net into the digital sea. The papal call for an info-ethic suggests that such does not currently exist, and we have sufficient evidence anyway to support that feeling in daily life, especially where major media corporations are concerned, but not only them. If there is a lack of general awareness of what the shift in paradigm in the digital era means at almost every level of human existence, it follows that we will not yet have developed an adequate moral stance either - we find ourselves afloat on a rather different sea, where the older rudders do not steer so well.

A whole new area of moral theology is open and waiting when we raise issues to do with identity and the way people handle and perceive self-expression and identity exploration online; privacy and everything about sharing personal information and corporate data online; credibility and trust online; authorship and ownership, with questions relating to downloading and remixing; participation and responsible conduct in online citizenship in virtual communities. And there is so much more.

There is at least one other issue broadly connected with the applied theological perspective we are currently engaged in here. People look for maps to follow. In the professional world ’code’ more often than not refers to a ’code of ethics’ or a protocol, something which lays down suitable guidelines for action. The chapter to follow takes up this question in response to the many who ask what guidelines can be offered for those who ply the communications routes available on today’s Web, especially for people for whom play, pleasure, community, discussion of issues in 146 characters or less are part of their natural sense of belonging to the digital world but who also want to communicate in a way that is good, truthful and aesthetic. For that matter, what guidelines need to apply for others who not so naturally at home in that world but are required to communicate through it?

6 Upright Citizens in a Digital world

Summary

Individuals and communities of consecrated life need to develop guidelines, perhaps even a scrutinium digitalis! Questions of identity, the varying nature of web sites (individual, institutional), content, use of social media, appropriate consumer attitude... a number of reflection tools are offered for community or individual use.

Our ever more frequent presence in the digital continent requires that we outline what our digital citizenship is all about. Both for our life online and offline there must always be respect for persons, and human dignity is to be protected. We should insist on this in formation: the awareness that our behaviour on the Web reflects who we are, and that ethics, our moral principles, apply here too.

We are aware of changes going on in communication because of digital technologies. Our entire existence is affected. Mass communication, interpersonal communication are changing as well as our way of knowing, being part of, collaborating with, our way of looking at the world.

A fantastic world of possibilities is opening up before us for communication at all levels. Education, ministry, catechetics, evangelisation are also changing, and changing the people we deal with as we, the media we communicate with, also change. We are faced with an important anthropological change, a cultural change.

Digital technologies offer us a pastoral opportunity. The Church is making it clear that we need to be present in the digital continent to evangelise in this new territory and help to create a participative and collaborative culture, one of respect and profound communication. At the same time, as with all human realities, we lack reflection on the implications all this has for us.

In each of the formation stages it would be convenient to tackle these issues. It is not always the case that the ease of use of digital technologies is accompanied by reflection on digital approaches. And then we also have to keep in mind the age differences amongst us, customs in various countries, including legislation which affects the Internet world.

Certain behaviours have legal repercussions, could even be criminal according to some legislation. We do not always appreciate this but we have to be aware of the legal repercussions as well as the immorality of cyber-bullying, posing as someone else online, using someone else’s profile or email and passing ourselves off as them, publishing comments which affect the good name of another person…

In general, we can speak of an ecology in the digital continent, that is, making the Web world habitable. This is now everyone’s responsibility: to construct this new territory for the human being to live in.

Ethical behaviour needs to bear in mind at least the following practical elements:

Personal communication, good manners, urbanity, courtesy, correctness.

Rediscovery of the value of the word. Communication on the Web is, for the most part, by means of the written word. The word needs to be an expression of who the person is. This involves the value of truth.

Ethical reciprocity: on the other side of the screen there is a human being. We must treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated.

Communication and shared knowledge; personal responsibility for the truthfulness of what we share and contribute in constructing knowledge when we take advantage of the possibilities offered by technology.

Respect for others’ opinions but with a critical mind and the courage to express it.

The value of privacy: our digital identity

We are creating our footprint on the Web. The Internet knows more and more about us, our face on the web is ever more distinct, there is more information about us, more data on our lives, photos and so on which together make up the digital identity of each one of us. Given that it is time to be on the Web, we must also take account of this. Today the person is the “portal”, and we are part of a flow of information that we cannot always control.

This is why we have to guard our privacy. We need to ask ourselves what data about us is on the Web, what information about us is flowing through the Web. Do we have blogs, profiles, take part in discussion forums, comments on our profiles, photo albums or videos on Youtube? There are also control technologies (cookies, passwords, keystroke logging or monitoring and the like) which discover information about the steps we take on the Internet without our knowing.

And at the same time we need to guard the privacy of others. At times we may write messages, commentaries which offer information about a third person without the authorisation to do so. In this sense we need to be very careful with images, especially of minors.

We have to be aware that we do not retain control over what we send or publish on the Internet. Once a message is sent, or a comment on a profile published we have no idea where it will end up. We have to give much thought to what we are publishing.

Another general principle, in relation to privacy, is that the Net never forgets. While there are no laws yet which facilitate control of content about us, what goes on the Internet (news, comments, photos, videos) remains for years.

There are two ideas that Internet users need to change. One is the feeling of impunity, where one thinks that what one does on the Web has no consequences: anything goes, on the Web we can say what we want about others. Laws exist to protect the person’s image, good reputation… especially where minors are concerned.

Our behaviour: sites, institutional profiles

Portals, blogs, web sites or profiles in social networks that belong to a Congregation, its Provinces, Communities and their work need to make their identity clear: who lies behind them and the aims they are pursuing through their Web presence. It might seem obvious, however an institutional site is not the same as a personal site.

We need to think about our presence on the Web (in the multiple ways that technology today allows for) as an educative and pastoral presence. This criterion should guide content, who we direct it to, and the basis and shape of our presence. These are pastoral presences, though different in approach.

Where it is a case of social networking profiles or forums that allow users to make comments, it is recommended that these be “moderated”, meaning they need authorisation before being published.

In the case of social networks it is essential to add our contacts and assign them to different groups. Not everyone belongs to the ’friend’ category. By differentiating between groups we can give discriminating information and access. There is a broader category, “fan”, which sets up another less strict relationship with users.

Our behaviour: sites, personal profiles

The Church is constantly asking priests and religious to be on the Web through web pages, blogs and profiles in social networks. This is a new form of evangelisation, being in contact with those to whom we are sent, creating new playgrounds where we can meet young people. Where it is possible, it is opportune to present ourselves as religious and consecrated persons, explaining the reasons for our presence on the Web. There could be contexts that demand a certain privacy in this regard.

Those involved in youth ministry, education, will receive many requests for friends to be part of their profile. We need to create groups to be discriminating about the information which each of them will have access to. We need to be very careful about the people we accept as part of our profile. We can also say “no” when adding more contacts. Later we need to consider that if we reject (“unfriend”) certain contacts this might be considered discourteous (“you are no longer my friend”).

Especially when dealing with minors, we have to be very cautious about the topics we deal with, the comments written, photos used and tagged.

Regarding content

The Internet permits access to all kinds of content. It is a place where there is need for a mature and responsible exercise of personal freedom, much more than before. Anything accomplished towards this end in initial and continuous formation is very useful in offering tools for those who are or will be part of the digital world.

One debatable issue is that of applying content filters to computers and servers. They could be useful for public computers with free access, but much more problematic in the case of personal computers. Besides, we have to bear in mind that it is more the case now that people access the Web through many gadgets and not only through a common server, and more frequently through open wi-fi outlets. It would seem more useful to insist on formation of the person, responsible use of the Web as indicated previously.

We need to empower the critical mind in the face of content, information. The ability to be part of the Web means that we are passing from specialised knowledge (episteme) to opinion (doxa). Knowing how to discern, judge what we are reading is much more important than before when sources of information were more controlled.

Especially in the early stages of formation it could be interesting to teach how to search for relevant content, what to search for, how to find it, how to evaluate information found and how to use it. The contents sought may vary in terms of what is permissible to download. This depends on legislation in each country. The practice (of downloading) might be against laws protecting intellectual property and might give occasion to be reported in certain countries. Illegal software comes under this category.

The Internet and the technology consumer

Another aspect to be considered is digital technology/Internet consumption. In daily life as a religious we dedicate time to prayer, study, pastoral work, community life, free time. Part of our time is taken up with our digital activity. Obviously digital technologies are more and more part of our lives, formation, leisure, ministry, social existence, even our prayer, and we need Internet support; we live on the Web.

One danger we can fall into is Internet dependency. This is why it is important to analyse the quantity and quality of the time spent as an Internet consumer. In extreme cases the Internet can cause addiction and make us, paradoxically, an obstacle to social and pastoral relationships. This too needs to be the object of reflection: our very consumption of technology. What gadgets, applications do we use? There is a financial element to this which is part and parcel of our personal and community choices. We need to understand how the technology market works, the sales strategies technology firms employ.

Technology and community life

We use various tools both personally and as a community. Personal computers and mobile phones are, for sure, the items we use most. They need to be used appropriately and with due care that they do not isolate us. It would be a paradox if we ended up using these media to communicate with so many other people but isolated ourselves from those closest to us.

One of the problems of our time is anxiety about not being connected. It seems that we can no longer live without being connected, always and everywhere. It would be good for a community to establish some rules for use of equipment/tools/gadgets in community times and places, aimed at making community life easier, with places where and times when these items are not in use.

Reflection tools

It would be clear, from the preceding chapters, that we ought not enter today’s digital continent without a good deal of solid reflection. Here we offer a kind of scrutinium digitalis which might lead to a community drawing up appropriate rules for its members, depending on local circumstances.

The community reflects: scrutinium digitalis

We identify our experience:

- which aspects of our digital involvement (beginning with the most obvious, the laptop or desktop computer, the mobile) have had a major incidence on the life of this community? If we are an international community, are there varying responses to this question, and what is that saying to us?

We reflect on our experience:

- if we begin to critically analyse our experience, are there events, changes in society (in general, but also in our Congregation), and in the Church which indicate the kind of impact that the digital era has in our regard? How has it altered the lifestyle of the society we are part of?

We throw light on our experience:

- are there charismatic aspects (icons of the Congregation, sayings of the Founder, typical actions…) that tell us something about what we have already discovered? Is there a ’digital divide’ in our experience, or in the Congregation? Can we discern an element of the Spirit here?

We consider alternatives:

- the digital world offers us challenges and opportunities. What kind of digital involvement (at whatever level) does our charism and mission ask of us?

We choose our horizons:

- the simple user, almost the object of digital forces, tends to have no particular horizon. But people who are proactive always work better with clear horizons, even if they are distant ones. What kind of horizon (e.g. biblical, charismatic, other) might best help us think ethically, responsibly, in terms of the mission?

We plan our activity:

- are we at a point where our involvement and digital practice needs some planning? Strategies? How do we put our intentions into practice?

The individual reflects with the community: pursuing the right presence

And now a reflection on digital interactivity, especially but not only involving social media, which may offer guidance to a community seeking to draw up its own ethical guidelines. The language used to ’map’ our presence online as consecrated persons needs to reflect not just the Web user in general, but the Web user who belongs to a particular charism. The language used here would say something to a Salesian of Don Bosco in particular. It could easily be substituted by similar language for another charism.

We map our online presence bearing in mind a number of key dimensions:

personal & private (community, friends, family, young people...)

Message:  I wish to tell you my story, hear your story.

Attitude:  father, friend, brother, able to draw out friendship in return.

Goal (education): openness to truth and responsible freedom.

Goal (evangelisation): Internet is part of our mission for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

Skills: understand the Internet; be up-to-date with technical developments; know how to manage security, privacy settings.

Tools: email, blogs, Facebook...

Professional & private (the mission, amongst confreres, with mission partners...)

Message: I am responsible with you for the common mission.

Attitude: For me, living means being here with you.

Goal (education): go where people are to be found.

Goal (evangelisation): form upright citizens and good Christians.

Skills: know how to create and share content; understand ’Net Ethics’ principles and practise ’Net Etiquette’.

Tools:  forums, discussion, feedback, wikis...

Personal & public (relationship with the wider public)

Message: I am passionate about God and human beings.

Attitude: I will help you grow in what is good and cast off every form of slavery.

Goal (education): create culture and spread patterns of life.

Goal (evangelisation): apply social media ’secrets’ to the task of evangelisation.

Skills: know how to make informed judgements on what is public and private.

Tools:  blogs, YouTube, Twitter, social bookmarking...

Professional & public (province, Congregation, church and its relationship with world)

Message: I wish to develop my professional competence and apostolic inventiveness.

Attitude: I will accept whatever is true, noble and just in various cultures.

Goal (education): recognise my gifts and the gifts of others.

Goal (evangelisation): receive from and offer the Church direction, mission skills.

Skills: know how to network and communicate effectively online.

Tools: aggregation, widgets & mashups, personal marketing...

7 Leavening the Digital Continent

Summary

Because the whole area of the semantic web has, until recently, been restricted to a handful of specialists, it might seem too difficult for most of us to tackle. Our reasons for tackling it here are not technical ones but evangelical ones - tackle it we must! The Web as we have known it is for people, but the Church of which we are a part has mountains of data, data which machines can read but not understand without help. Linked data is now transforming the Web, and we need to bring our data and our way of helping machines understand it to bear on that, or we will be left out entirely.

What might it mean to leaven the digital continent? The term might bring to mind the yeast Jesus referred to a number of times in the Gospels, though one cannot but realise that in the majority of cases he had in mind a corrupting influence. In just one instance (Mt 13:33 and its equivalent in Lk 13:20,21), he gave it a positive leavening connotation as the woman takes yeast and ’hides’ it in three measures of flour. The quantity of flour and the imagined output is considerable! It is an excellent metaphor for something which the rest of this chapter wishes to present, and to my knowledge at least, the idea which I am presenting here has not been put this way before in quite these religious terms: the suggestion that a pinch of well-chosen code could be mixed into web pages until the World Wide Web is “leavened all through”.

We cannot really avoid living, or at least partly living, in the digital continent today. Three key groups in the leavening enterprise are addressed in what follows: the first is the broader Church, and especially consecrated life which has "helped to make the mystery and mission of the Church shine forth"  [ Blessed Pope John Paul II, Post Synodal exhortation, Vita Consecrata, 1, 1996].  It is an appeal to the Church especially, though not only, through its groups of consecrated life, to consider the importance of taking steps now rather than later towards what is variously termed Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web, or the Web of Data. These terms will be explained.

The second group addressed is more particular in that the coordination and management of the official websites of groups within consecrated life should no longer be thought of as a secondary task. It may be a delegated task, but the ultimate responsibility for a Web presence lies with the particular consecrated life group.

The third group is more particular again - data creators and webmasters. While not everyone is a webmaster, most end up being data creators, perhaps without realising it. Data is different to documents, but often contained within them; many who prepare documents overlook the fact that these documents frequently contain unstructured data, anything from names and addresses to statistics, and a variety of meta-information (sometimes hidden from the writer if they are using a word processing program, but there all the same). Given that Web 3.0 is about structuring and connecting data we are all involved, it seems to me.

We are invited to engage in the mammoth undertaking of achieving a comprehensive view of all that exists, as St Thomas Aquinas in his own time engaged in that task. When the Scholastics wrote Summae, they were attempting such a task. When we begin to study just how Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologica, however, we are left astounded! It would appear that he contained what today we would call the World Wide Web in his own memory! He used various mnemonic devices in the process to recall his knowledge and set out to ensure that it would be a summation of knowledge which even and perhaps especially, the beginner could use.

We live in exponential times

When Jesus spoke of three measures of flour, he was speaking of a substantial quantity. Today we would speak in terms of terabytes, petabytes, yotabytes or even zetabytes! We live in exponential times. It is pointless simply lamenting information overload when in fact it is possible to take some steps to managing this information. There are many new skills now needed by the ordinary netizen, and some ability to create and employ structured data is one of them.

The Scriptures offer us homely images like a woman baking bread, or fishermen sorting the good and the bad from their nets. Christian tradition offers at least one other image which might help us understand Web 3.0, a term that will be described in more detail further on: the spiritual classic, the Interior Castle or The Mansions:

I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle, made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal in which there are many rooms.

 [St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle or The Mansions, accessible at http://www.twolisteners.org/InteriorCastle2.htm. This quote comes from her opening comments in the First Mansion].

For Teresa, hidden in the centre is God, and each of seven mansions is a place on the path to spiritual union, ’marriage’ with God at the centre, the seventh mansion.

Think of that castle as the digital continent which does not have physical rooms or hallways but certainly has virtual ones. How do we find our way around? Are various rooms connected? Could we follow certain guiding paths to reach the treasure at the centre, which is still God by the way if we read Benedict XVI’s still very relevant message on new technologies? The push towards structured data is but one aspect of the "proclamation of Christ in the world of new technologies [requiring] a profound knowledge of this world if the technologies are to serve our mission adequately"  [Pope Benedict XVI, World Communications Day Message 2009].

Or to bring things into our own 21st century and our interest in ecology, we might be able to think of a garden, a somewhat overgrown garden maybe, but with paths which one can walk around, or with vines and creepers which seem to connect all over. On the surface it seems relatively simple to move around the garden, even follow the creepers, but just imagine how things are a bit below the soil where everything is thriving with the complex, messy but ecosystemic stuff of life! This might help us understand what Web 3.0 is attempting to tackle if it has the right tools.

Does it have the right tools? Just to emphasize the exponential growth in this area, below are two diagrams. One shows the number of ’tools’ available in the semantic web area in 2007, the other in 2010. The growth in this area is clear!

Figure 7.1 Linked data 2007

Figure 7.2 Linked data 2010

Explaining terms

Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0; semantic web or linked data or web of linked data; HTML, http protocol; Uniform Resource Identifier or URI; Data and documents; markup, marking up; unstructured data and structured data.

We frequently hear talk of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. They are not very imaginative labels! They do not have any hard and fast definition, but in general terms we could say that Web 1.0 is the Web as something static. At best it had hyperlinks, since the Web introduced us to hypertext, or ’clickable’ links. That in itself revolutionised the way people engaged in the act of reading, and seeing the world, but it was only the beginning. Web 2.0 is fully upon us if we consider that it is about interactivity and connecting people. Just think of the exponential explosion of social media sites, and we need be no more technical than that. Web 2.0 connects people.

So Web 3.0? At this point, we can be more imaginative, along the lines of our castles or our creepers, our ecosystems, and begin to speak of semantic web, if we have some sort of grasp of semantics, or linked data, a term introduced to us by the W3C, a standards group with Sir Tim Berners-Lee as its Director (currently). Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, its HTML language, and gave us the http protocol for transferring information across the Internet. His original inspiration, according to him, is only now beginning to reach its zenith: he envisaged a web of linked data. Everything can be linked by the World Wide Web (including objects, documents, people, data, other links), by considering everything and everyone as a ’resource’ and giving everything, everyone, a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. This is achieved, especially on websites, by writing them up (the correct term is marking up; markup is the noun form) in particular ways.

Data and documents are not the same thing. Think of documents as containers for data, but very often containing data in an unstructured way. Think too of the implications of this. Human beings can make sense of documents, or most of them anyway, with a little bit of effort. Computers, which are machines, cannot make sense of a document as we human beings can, though they can tell us where they can be found and can search the words and tell us where the same word turns up in many documents. A computer can make no sense whatsoever of unstructured data. The human being has context, and can know things because of that, though even this is limited. There is simply too much out there to know! We need at least some structured data.

A web page, which could also be called an HTML page, is usually a structured document which may contain unstructured data as well. Human beings can ’read’ web pages and draw certain conclusions. If a Salesian web page were to contain the acronym AFO, most Salesians would make connections like: Africa, French-speaking, West, vice-province; and they may make further connections such as Ivory Coast (a very contextualised aspect in 2011 because of political and social upheaval), parish, or people they know who work in the vice-province. So in this sense AFO is an item of unstructured data requiring the human mind to understand and provide appropriate structure.

The problem is that only human beings, and a limited number at that, can do this for the vast majority of web pages belonging to consecrated life groups as they stand currently, assuming that most of them have a minimum of additional semantic markup. A machine (by which we mean here a computer, a search engine) cannot make the connections, and has no contextual ability whatsoever unless the pages can offer it; and they can – this is the point I am making. Despite a certain amount of interactivity on our web pages, then, the reality is that they may remain slight in terms of their semantic quality, and that can have consequences for us.

There are two levels of approach. The first is already provided by the HTML language, which is ’semantic’ by nature, meaning that it indicates elements for what they are rather than what they look like on the screen: for example a title is referenced by markup which indicates <title>My Title</title>. So if a web page follows this principle and ensures that titles, paragraphs, headings, abbreviations and the like are marked up as such, then the first level of semantic markup has been achieved. Marking up presentational aspects, which add nothing to semantics, only to ’eye candy’ is best achieved by referencing a separate file called a Cascading Style Sheet, which has an extension .css and contains whatever colours, sizes and other ’pretty’ aspects we want to include.

This first level of approach will ensure that titles, headings, paragraphs and the like are understood for what they are, but it would not help to make sense of AFO beyond the fact that we could mark it up as <abbr>AFO</abbr> or an abbreviation. That is at least helpful. We need to add additional markup, though, to provide the page with context for AFO. We could, for example, provide geospatial coordinates (e.g. from Google Maps), and this would enable a search engine to immediately tie AFO to the precise location of the Provincial House. There are a number of different kinds of markup available to do this. Here is not the place to go into the technical details of that markup. But as I write, it would not be unfair to say that such markup would be evident in the tiniest fraction of websites belonging to consecrated life, less than 1%. ’Evident’, by the way, does not mean that the human being can see this markup just by reading the page. It would be evident if one goes to the ’source’ version of the page. But a machine will see it, and can now make the correct connections.

The times they are achangin’

Semantic Web, Web of Data, Linked Data - these terms now become important because of what has just been said about computers not being able to make connections; that is less true now than it was, say, twenty years back, or even ten. There are ways of enabling computers to make any number of connections, and even draw some logical conclusions; that is, ways of giving computers sufficient context to know that two people with the same surname are different people, that it is Pascual and not Hugo Chávez that an item of data called ’Chávez’ is referring to. Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of connected data has now begun to take concrete shape. And this concrete shape has two implications for the Church’s membership: one is that its documentation (of which it has mountains!) needs to have semantic as well as presentational structure, especially if transferred into digital formats, and the other is that its presence in the digital continent via websites and other digital forms needs to adopt the ’leavening’ practice of semantics understood as linked data, to ensure that its data, as distinct from and in addition to its documents, help build the kingdom of God too.

Consecrated life in the Church can feel itself invited to be in missio ad gentes in the digital continent, along with other subjects in Pope Benedict’s 2009 WCD Message. We are a "reality which affects the whole Church" [M]  [M] Vita Consecrata, 3) and, we believe, the whole world, since it is our task to sanctify the world. But we need to take appropriate action in the digital continent as part of sanctifying the world. There are other reasons too why we need to take it. Wikipedia is now considered a huge database in the linked data universe, and it has been turned into a machine queriable database through DBpedia (http://dbpedia.org). The main objective of DBpedia is to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make it freely available on the Web. In a nutshell, DBpedia is the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia. As a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia it is unrivalled as a Summa of just about everything there is. But if we play no part in ensuring that accurate and positive information about us is in Wikipedia in the first place, other dominant interests may wish to do it for us - and possibly not the way we would want.

It is important to say this because even a cursory glance at explanations of the semantic web, linked data on the Web will reveal dominant interests, especially but not only commerical, to the point where one might ask if there is any value in bodies such as ourselves taking this same direction. The evangelical, but one could suggest also the educational, ethical and even economic answer to this question has to be ’yes’. Our involvement in the semantic web or call it what you will, has at least the following consequences, which will resonate, surely, with our brothers and sisters in the Church:

A higher profile, and a profile of the kind we ourselves wish to guide rather than leave to others: this is achieved by providing meaningful links between ’pages’ and their data, and their documents across the World Wide Web.

Authoritative information: if we do not help establish authority for religious information on the Web, others will.

New audiences: something directly related to evangelisation, and to some extent to education, formation. Linked Data can lead to new people coming across our information - but not just isolated information. It is information given correct and significant context.

Better user experience: business might say ’satisfied customers’, but the Church wishes to provide an ’encounter’ which can be open to the Divine. One small way is to provide high quality and contextually relevant information.

Efficient use of resources: this is both ethical and economical. Too much of our data is ’wasted’ if it is simply siloed in some hidden database. Of course, this is not about releasing all information into the wild, but choosing to release and link appropriate information that is generally scarce but useful in today’s world, and allowing others to enrich it. A good example of this is in the NGO sector. Each NGO may have different database engines, but much of the data is of a public nature and should be made linkable. Additionally, a congregational website may contain maps locating communities. If these are given geospatial coordinates expressed as linked data, an NGO or other service, in the event of a disaster, may arrive in time to save lives.

Gaining true visibility

We want to have a stronger web visibility, and that means not only quantity (which we already have) but quality. Here we do not mean quality in terms of content – of course we want that, and let’s assume we are all striving for that already – but in terms of semantics, that is, the amount of context and connection we can give to our content on the web. The context and connection we offer, especially by marking up web pages with the suggested approaches, goes a long way to establishing stronger visibility both now and in the future:

Now, because the main search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are all looking for that markup, which is partly why they exist. They will recognise the common vocabularies easily. Therefore we need to mark up what we can mark up with these vocabularies.

In the future, because we are becoming aware of the possibilities once an entity can provide very clear semantic information. New applications are arriving everyday to enable people to profit from this work. Data which is quite specific to consecrated life could be marked up with an appropriate vocabulary now, in the hope that it can one day be recognised.

Taking action

The Church’s membership, and especially consecrated life, has an opportunity to influence the connections that are already being made in the digital continent. Some of the steps it can take are relatively simple, others require the skills and expertise of specialists in the IT and Knowledge Management fields. The following proposals indicate the kinds of steps that can be, and should be taken.

Born-digital material: We make whatever efforts we are capable of making to ensure that the born-digital material we are responsible for is semantically strong. This means giving it a degree of semantic structure. This much is a language-independent issue. It also supports all higher order efforts towards semantic visibility which are the responsibility of people such as webmasters who are technically prepared for their task.

Term bases or controlled vocabulary: Work on our term bases or sets of controlled vocabulary should begin or continue. Without this kind of effort it is difficult to enter the semantic web effectively. Terms like taxonomy, ontology now have slightly modified explanations in the context of the digital continent. They are ways of describing the reality of consecrated life (understood as a specific domain with its own discourse) without which it is very hard to describe them accurately on the Web, or give them an appropriate Uniform Resource Identifier. The more of this kind of effort that can be developed across and by Religious Institutes, the better it will be for our visibility in the digital continent.

Ontology: The extended work into an ontology should begin or continue. A well-developed ontology, eventually constructed in a web-related ontology language, will have many benefits for the future because it will help at several levels of visibility, including helping members of consecrated life themselves to better understand their own charism.

Semantic vocabulary: We finalise appropriate vocabularies for use in semantic markup on websites, keeping in mind their possible application to other like institutions. At the time of writing there is no vocabulary finalised, though there is an experimental version at: http://www.sdb.org/vocabulary/ConsecratedLife/.

Semantic markup choice: We encourage our webmasters to adopt an appropriate semantic markup for their purposes, beginning with what can be appropriately marked up without a specific vocabulary for consecrated life. Since there are existing vocabularies for person, event, address, organization, amongst others, there are already many items that can be marked up without special reference.

While the task of marking up web pages falls to webmasters, who certainly need to keep up with their field, the reality is that Web 3.0, involves meaning and context, so inevitably involves everyone who either provides material for content or interprets what is found there. Semantics are social!

Given that almost anybody today is frequently called on to put together some sort of document, the very first step for greater visibility in the digital continent is to put these things together ’semantically’. This is not so hard to explain – it means allowing every element in the document to offer meaning as distinct from merely presentational elements which are simply there to look at. To the extent that this is done, the webmaster (assuming that many of these documents will find their way onto the web at some stage) will be assisted considerably in his or her task, which includes discovering structured or unstructured data in the documents and taking further steps to mark them up as well. So far, the tendency has been to link documents, not data. But we also need to ensure documents are semantically structured as far as possible.

Vocabularies – this where the real yeast lies

An essential starting point for linking data is to have an appropriate vocabulary which can be shared by others. There are a number of such vocabularies sitting on a namespace (essentially a URL), which others can use. But few of them would allow a website belonging to consecrated life to mark up information which it regards as essential data for defining what it is, what it stands, for, what it does. If consecrated life wishes to take a much more prominent and positive, even avant garde role in the digital continent, it is essential that it work on vocabularies which express what is essential to it and which is not covered by existing vocabularies.

Because the World Wide Web ’writes’ (behind the scenes) in English and, for that matter, in U.S. English, HTML tags and many other things behind the scenes must be written in US English. It follows that a vocabulary for semantic web purposes must be written in US English too. The ’U.S.’ here refers to North American spelling usage; for example we write ’color’ not ’colour’ if we are including that term in a vocabulary, in HTML, or other web-related languages behind the scenes.

There is no question, though, that the use of appropriate semantic vocabularies is essential if we wish to move to Web 3.0. This is the semantic ’yeast’ that can make a difference to quality web presence.

But here a caveat: we cannot think that just because we have created our own vocabulary, it will be recognised! One only has to look at the existing main vocabularies being pushed by Google, Yahoo and Bing, to realise that much of the vocabulary specific to consecrated life has no place in them or, at best, can be described semantically, for linked data purposes, only if it belongs to existing categories such as Person, Organization, Event. The point I make here is that if we wish to be more visible we will need to use the standard common vocabularies for now. But if we do nothing to bring our custom vocabularies to the attention of the major search engines, we will remain outside. Developing our own vocabularies for semantic web purposes is a long-term option.

A starting point for Web 3.0, then, is some kind of term base (what we call it does not matter; at least a controlled vocabulary). It could be simpler than the example that is indicated below, but at least some kind of sorting out of important terms is an essential preliminary work.

Is Salesian Termbase a vocabulary that could be used for the semantic web? In theory yes, though one look at vocabularies for this purpose as listed, for example, at: http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html, shows that they may have only 10-20 upper-level terms in them. Salesian Termbase has upward of 400 terms in it. But people who introduce appropriate semantic markup into HTML (it may be called microdata, RDFa or other formats currently available) may use more than one vocabulary. So from that point of view we could find the material for more than one vocabulary already inside a controlled vocabulary such as Salesian Termbase. The rule of thumb is to have as few vocabularies as possible, adopting an approach that encourages people to make their data available in forms that are easier for others to pick up and use because they see some benefit in them. Where possible we would want to use existing vocabularies, and only use the ’ConsecratedLife’ or other future special vocabularies where we believe our data is not covered by any other description.

We need to organise our vocabularies into simple pages of term and description, with a particular value or values for a term, if that needs to be the case. Then we place one or more of these vocabularies on an existing domain that we own and control, and there we have it. We may call on this vocabulary stored in what is technically termed a ’namespace’, and so may anyone else.

A vocabulary might be described in this context as all the things we can say about something. In much of consecrated life we have many things we have said about something! To arrive at a distilled ’vocabulary’ for our discourse as found on the World Wide Web, we will be helped by what today is known as an ontology. If ontology in its original philosophical meaning was the study of things, then ontology in its new web-related meaning follows on from that and in our case becomes a study of our things or our reality, and shows how all these things connect to one another. There is a preliminary, not too rigidly developed example of an ontology in Salesian Termbase (the Visual Termbase). A term base or controlled vocabulary and an ontology will help identify terms that are central but not adequately describable by existing semantic vocabularies.

No semantic web vocabulary currently lists the term charism. But we could hardly talk about our things or our reality without that term, so it is a must-have for a semantic vocabulary dealing with consecrated life. Think of how many things we can say about our life as consecrated persons and our activities that link back to our charism. And we know that all other religious institutes would want the same term, so our semantic vocabulary must try as much as possible to contain terms that will help others like us. This will encourage its wider use. Wider use can lead to more visibility for everyone concerned.

Here is where the simple but complicated nature of the task becomes most obvious. In some ways there is a crisis of vocabulary on the World Wide Web today! There has been much formal analysis of knowledge and its representation, but very little guidance on what actually works: we can prepare our own vocabularies but we know that at this point they may not gain immediate recognition. We will need to work at getting them recognised and to do that we have to have them and use them - despite their being ignored!

A note on structuring documents

I said earlier that it is important to have as much structured information as possible, and this begins with documents, then extends to data. If the previous section seems to appeal more to the webmaster (it does!), this section is for anybody who produces documents which have the potential to find a place on the Web.

One should not be surprised at the suggestion that consecrated life groups today pay more careful attention to this issue. It has a long history which includes the 12th and 13th century Scholastic developments introduced especially in the monastic context: the pioneering efforts of the monks in dividing and organising text. Paragraph markings, chapter titles, running titles, marginal numbers, concordances, alphabetical indexes emerged in this period. Prior to them, Irish monks had already introduced word separation and rather elaborate punctuation and decoration - scholars think none of this was simply for aesthetic purposes. It was practical. The elaborations of whatever kind assisted reading, understanding and memory. Word-for-word memorisation of entire texts was a prominent goal of education at the time.

Let’s take the simple case of someone writing a document produced by any word processor. It will probably have a title and headings, and may have an image or two. Our role should be to allow the software to look after the aesthetics, once we make some choices, and instead focus more on the semantic decisions. This will be a change of mindset for many. The human being can make decisions that the software cannot. Every word processing program allows the writer to choose styles and call things by semantic names (meaningful names, usually in terms of structure): title is semantic in this sense. A search engine knows that a title has a certain importance in the overall structure of the document. It knows that heading 1 is more important than heading 2, and so on – so we would do well to find out how our software produces title, heading 1 and heading 2 styles. Then if we want a title to be styled in a particular way, say with Times Roman 18 pt bold or anything else, we style our semantic element (title, in this case) this way. A search engine cannot make any sense of the presentation details, but nor does it have to. It already knows that the element is a title and that will do for it to tell the world that this is important for the thoughts we are trying to offer.

The new feature here in our digital lives is the search engine. When word-processing programs were first invented, search engines did not exist or at least were not popularised. But now Google, Yahoo and Bing, to name just the ’big three’, go looking for semantics, not only words, and they have no interest at all in presentational aspects. It is this factor that now must enter our thinking as we prepare documents.

The same approach needs to apply to a paragraph. Paragraph is a meaningful term – it means a thought expressed in writing, maybe several thoughts that hold together around a central one. There is no need for detailed grammatical knowledge here; it is common sense, so we let the whole enterprise down (the enterprise of writing our document, that is) if we only call titles, titles and headings, heading. Our paragraph has to be called paragraph too. In other words we don’t really create a paragraph by coming to the end of our written thoughts and hitting the ’enter’ key twice! A search engine has no idea about that, but it can recognise a paragraph as a semantic unit. And how do we do that? We go to our word processor’s ’style’ list and find ’paragraph styles’ (because there are all kinds of paragraphs after all – a quotation is a paragraph, but so is a signature). In other words, paragraphs need to be called by what they are rather than what they could look like. Once we have defined what kind of paragraph it is, we could choose to have a line break after it as part of its style. This is not difficult to do but it makes the world of difference – and the writer suddenly finds less need to use the ’enter’ key. Once, instead of twice for every paragraph!

Styling our work this way is not especially evangelical in nature, but it decidedly prepares the way. The point that Jesus makes about yeast in five out of seven of his references can also be taken here. Anyone engaged in sprinkling purely presentational elements throughout a document is engaging in an activity that only helps to ’corrupt’ that document semantically speaking, or at least neutralise it, if you believe ’corrupt’ is a bit strong in this instance. But follow the kind of advice offered here and a document will be enhanced in much the same way that the woman in Mt 13:33 does for the bread she is baking – a pinch of yeast leavens the three measures of flour all the way through.

8 Conclusion

Summary

We need to do today what the monks in the Middle ages did: they gave text and documents structure and led the world in doing similarly. We would be remiss if we abandoned the digital continent in this regard, with its new requirements for structure and knowledge management.

In Spirituality: in, out and all around, we took the Gospel passage from Mark describing Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. I suggested how we might enter into the imagination involved in that passage in such a way as to hear and see and feel what was happening. The fact is that the Evangelist there had to use the tools at his disposal to do that. If he were writing today would he have done it the same way? Perhaps not. The tools today offer other possibilities. Here is one individual’s way of managing it in a delightful online version (which I duly acknowledge)  [ Ed Cyzewski, The Lost Tweets of Jesus: Uncovering the World’s Greatest Ancient Digital Mystery, http://tinyurl.com/3bdfe5o]

What’s happening?

Time to kick things off. Repent 4 the Kingdom of God is near.

@Baptizer You free today? I’m swinging by your part of the Jordan today.

Getting baptized. I’m asking a kid to hang on to my smart phone for a minute. LOL

Sissera wasn’t kidding when he said the Jordan is a dirty river. I’ll have to get transfigured to clean my robe.

@GodtheFather @HolySpirit Thanks for showing up. Mind sending a few angels my way for the wilderness? Spending 40 days in the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.

Just got back from the wilderness. Hitting the unleavened bread HARD tonight.

#FollowMeFriday @RockSimon @Andrew @ThunderJohn @ThunderJames

The author makes it clear he is having a little fun:

Just to be clear, this is a fun little parody. Since I’m interested in theology and culture, I thought it would make a fun April Fools Day joke. I hope it made you laugh and did not instigate a crisis of faith. I also hope you in no way associated this project with the actual company known as Twitter. Twitter had nothing to do with this project. Nor did Jesus for that matter….

We are interested in theology and culture too, especially the culture that we have consistently referred to throughout as belonging to the digital continent. We are allowed to have our lighter side, but there is also some very hard work to be done. That would have been evident throughout this book: a work of reflection, thinking things through in a new paradigm, and not only reflection - there are things we have to do at the end of it all. The penultimate chapter was the most demanding in this latter respect. But if the monks in the Middle Ages were the ones who gave us document and knowledge structures that have served us well for centuries, we cannot abandon the task in the new digital context which demands new structures. We must do today what they did then, or leave it to the contemporary narrative that Tolkien was so concerned about to do it. And what was his concern? When asked by an interviewer  [Tolkien’s last radio interview was broadcast by the BBC Radio 4 in 1971 and can be read or heard at http://www.newsfrombree.co.uk] whether his Middle-earth was “in a sense … the world we live in, but at a different era?”, Tolkien replied simply “No… at a different stage of imagination, yes”. Tolkien was concerned about the contemporary narrative, the scientific world-view and its effect on us. He wanted to balance that by giving back a sense of mystery to the world. It is one of the reasons why I have chosen his simple, childlike narrative as a starting and finishing point for this book which is not, of course, about hobbits at all! It is about people like us who accept the Lord’s call to consecration in the world and for the world’s sake, and a sense of adventure along with it. One of the important tasks the consecrated person, and the group to which he or she belongs has, is that of giving back a sense of mystery to the world.

We can give the world back its sense of mystery in many ways; we can be serious, even heavy about it or we can light, possibly flippant about it. I wanted to take a ’Middle earth’ approach, neither heavy nor flippant, in dealing with issues that are serious in themselves, because they are issues every young and not so young member of consecrated life today must confront. We want to give God prior place, but we also want to give God’s creation, especially the human being with all the wonderful things humans have learned to accomplish, due place too. We are people with a passion for God and a passion for humanity.

Document generated by eLyXer 1.2.1 (2011-03-07) on 2011-10-05T09:18:20.111981