The main conversation around Pope Francis’s remarkable encyclical letter is appropriately on the core messages — that human-driven climate change is dangerous; access to energy matters; that consumptive capitalism is a problem, not a solution.
But there are other rich veins to tap, including a vital section on big challenges posed by the online and electronic media environment — a world with too much information, more insularity than outreach, a fog of facts immersed in spin and fiction, a bias to momentary stimulus over reasoned thought.
Here’s how Francis puts it:
[W]hen media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload. Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature.
Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.
There is a “woe is me” tone here, except in the phrase that almost prompted me to shout out exultantly on the train into New York City this morning:
Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches.
This is precisely why I shifted from full-time journalism into teaching in late 2009. This is why I called my graduate communication course “ blogging a better planet.” This is why I write about social media and other communication tools not just as another messaging portal, but as a fundamental and potentially revolutionary means of sharing and shaping ideas that can build a better relationship between communities and between the human community and our rare Earth.
It’s no accident that what I call “knowosphere” derives from noosphere — an emerging planet of the mind — a phrase that emerged in the mid 20th century in large part through the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, philosopher and paleontologist (who’s mentioned in a footnote in the encyclical).
I hope Francis keeps this theme in mind when he visits Washington and the United Nations later in the year.
A focus on what you might call conscious communication can greatly improve prospects for limiting climatic and other environmental risks, advancing the spread of cleaner energy technologies, reducing waste, pressing corporations to improve practices and just about every other papal priority.
Here’s a meme-style version of the encyclical passage that you might share to convey this more widely — especially on social media:
