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As I’m burnishing the deathless prose with which I expect to revolutionize the intellectual and spiritual lives of conference-goers, I’m culling quotations from pertinent sources, and found myself going over the Pontifical Council for Social Communications’ “The Church and the Internet,” which showed intriguing signs of cluetrainical insight.
Consider: “The Church also needs to understand and use the Internet as a tool of internal communications. This requires keeping clearly in view its special character as a direct, immediate, interactive, and participatory medium.
“Already, the two-way interactivity of the Internet is blurring the old distinction between those who communicate and those who receive what is communicated, and creating a situation in which, potentially at least, everyone can do both. This is not the one-way, top-down communication of the past.”
Did Msgr. John P. Foley write that, or did Doc Searls script it for him?
There are predictable manifestations of the Magisterium’s nervousness about free dialogue — “it is confusing, to say the least, not to distinguish eccentric doctrinal interpretations, idiosyncratic devotional practices, and ideological advocacy bearing a ‘Catholic’ label from the authentic positions of the Church,” and “The ‘tendency on the part of some Catholics to be selective in their adherence’ to the Church’s teaching is a recognized problem in other contexts; more information is needed about whether and to what extent the problem is exacerbated by the Internet” — but the clues are there in the foreground.
Hmmm. Seems more like the millitary cluefulness as described by Laura Trippi at the DG conference. The basic program is to control the chaos generated by the unleashing of many voices so as the preserve the hierarchy. In contrast to the message of ClueTrain where the essence is the respect for individual autonomy, intellegence and authority, and the value this brings to the mission of the clueful organization.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the role of authority and hierarchy, which clearly have a place in history, if not the future. In my view, the authority of just leadership can only arise from the ground up based on the respect and honor of free people. The true leader is first amoung equals based on merrit and quality in action and dead.
Clear in this excerp is the fact that the church hierarchy is fearful of any truly open dialog that grants autonomy to individuals to make choices in accord with their hearts.