Making the Most of Technology

 

Digital Bridge: Father Yameogo participates in the videoconference with Africa.

"I am very happy to participate in this event dedicated to Digital Bridge, a technological Bridge with Cameroon and the Saharawi People.”

 

“I am pleased to bring you the warm and sincere welcome of the Pontifical council for Social Communication that would like to encourage this important initiative aiming to reduce the digital divide, access inequality and the use of technology in the so-called information society.

 

I appreciate all the institutions that support schools, morally and with financial resources, because whoever throughout the world, and especially the poorest, may benefit from a global information society.

 

ICT is the characterising element of the 21st century.

 

"Our age – Pope Benedict XVI has explained – is witnessing a hitherto unknown expansion of the frontiers of communication, an unprecedented convergence amongst media that enables interactivity. The web manifests an open vocation that tends to be egalitarian and pluralist, but also represents a new trench, the digital divide. It separates those who are included from those who are excluded and becomes part of the many other gaps that already exist between and within nations.” The risk, therefore, is that our “spirit may be polluted, making our faces less smiling, sadder and keeping us from greeting each other without look ourselves in the eyes.”

 

I would also like to emphasise the interest that the Church has for the promotion of these means of communication and its desire to collaborate in this project, because it is important that digital communication be centred “on the promotion of peoples’ dignity.” We must beware of the increase “in homologation and control, intellectual and moral relativism, which can be easily identified in the decrease in critical spirit, in the reduced truths of opinion play and in the multiple forms of degradation and humiliation of people’s intimacy.”

 

We hope that ICT will serve to create sustainable development and improve public welfare, improving social cohesion, strengthening democracy, promoting human rights and reaping the full value of different cultures. This is why Pope Benedict XVI encourages “all people of good will, active in the sphere of digital communication, to work on promoting a culture of respect, dialogue and friendship.”