The Pope on Twitter:
How's it going after the first month?
Translated from the Italian service of
January 28, 2014
The number of followers (more than 2.5 million now, of which 1.5 million are Anglophone) of Benedict XVI's Twitter posts is obviously not the only important datum for evaluating the pros and cons of the Pope's presence on this very popular social network.
[Considering that the most 'followed' Twitters are pop idols Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry (each of whom has about 30 million followers), and that even the 'famous for absolutely nothing' Kim Kardashian has 17 million followers - I literally cringe everytime someone in the Vatican touts the number of @Pontifex followers. Why even set the Pope up in competition with run-of-the-mill celebrities?
The world has 1.2 billion Catholics, and if we go by the current figure that Twitter now has 500 million followers (roughly 7 percent of a world population of 7.1 billion), and cutting that percentage by half - to 3.5%, to factor in the fact that many Catholics live in the underdeveloped world - the potential base for @Pontifex followers would be as many as 420 million. Cut that figure further to one-tenth, to be ultra-realistic, and we have 42 million. Does Mons. Celli think that figure will be reached any time soon?]
The magazine
Popoli (Peoples) of the Jesuits of Milan commissioned the first in-depth analysis of the responses thus far to Benedict XVI's tweets. There were 270,456 responses in the first month of the tweeting.
Among these, "more than 200,000 were neutral in content; 26,426 were considered positive; and 22,542 negative, among which 26% were focused primarily on the issue of sex-offender priests and 25% - about 5,000 - consisted in true and proper insults".
[Now that makes me feel better. We have a figure now - 5,000 responses out of 270,456 (less than 1.9%) - were malignant messages, and more generally, 22,542 responses (8.3%) were negative. It tells me that the anti-Pope/anti-Church hate brigades aren't as numerous or industrious as one may suppose they could be - if they were more industrious, they could pack the record as they want, the way voters cast as many votes as they can on American Idol.]
As for the positive responses, the highest percentage were retweets (26.5%)
[This is the category that Papal tweets are most aimed at in order to truly 'spread the Word', but it represents quite a low figure right now!], followed by messages of thanks and best wishes (25%).
[So, should we assume that the rest of the positive messages were simply favorable comments?]
The inquiry also analyze the Twitter accounts of a Curial head (Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi), seven cardinals who are metropolitan archbishops (Angelo Scola of Milan, Odilo Scherer of Sao Paolo, Wilfrid Fox Napier of Durban, South Africa, Timothy Dolan of New York, Lluis Martinez Sistach of Barcellona, Ruben Salazar Gomez of Bogotà, Sean Patrick O'Malley of Boston), and of a prelate who is increasingly an authoritative voice on the question of faith and technology, the Jesuit Fr. Antonio Apadaro, editor of the Rome-based Jesuit magazine
La Civilta Cattolica.
Their current following ranges from 1,900 for Cardinal Martinez Sitaach to 71,000 for Cardinal Dolan. Their average tweets per day is 2.5, from O'Malley's one to Spadaro's 9.
The retweet rate is interesting - 40% for Scola, 100% for Dolan, while Ravasi, Scherer, Salazar and O'Malley are re-tweeted by 82-90 percent.
Using a popular indicator used by the social networks, Klout (klout-com), Popoli assigned an index of influence of 79 to Ravasi and 3 to Spadaro.
A sense of how Twitter is used is given by an analysis of the first five tweets on each account according to the type of messages originally tweeted.
Ravasi chooses to show balance and courage by citing distinguished persons, from Swift to Calvino, through De Souvre, Gandhi and Pasolini. Scola prefers to exhort and call on the faithful to keep their focus on God. Scherer uses his messages to campaign for causes, especially against abortion. Napier uses playful irony to recall the principles of the Church and uses direct examples such as Obama and his support of same-sex 'marriage'. Dolan is all about calling the faithful back to the ways of God. Martinez Sistach urges his followers to support activities promoting peace and a healthy economy. Salazar Gomez spices up his calls for observance of Catholic values with personal 'news' about himself. O'Malley is also exhortative, usually promoting Catholic values.
I do not have the time to look into the above Twitter accounts, so I do not have any idea how their tweets compare with what the Pontifical Council for Social Communications has been generating so far for Benedict XVI. Since I only want the very best for our beloved Pope, all I can say of the PCSC-generated tweets so far is that surely they can do better about fashioning tweets that say what the Pope often says - much more forcefully and indelibly - in a way that does better justice to him and to the message. So far, the tweets have been rather 'blah'.
For purposes of 'serious' messaging, composing a tweet has to be seen as an art form, like a Japanese haiku, and cannot be left to earnest but ultimately uninspired bureaucrats. It's not just a question of being able to boil down a message to 140 characters, but how the message is expressed in 140 characters.
This, of course, is only one of my many reservations about the Twittermania in Mons. Celli's dicastery. Not a day goes by that he is not making a statement about the Pope's tweets, the latest being that it will soon add Chinese to its repertoire. We have heard more from Mons. Celli in the past month than we have ever heard from him in a decade, almost as if he finally has found a platform to make himself noticed and heard.
It makes me share Dino Boffo's weekend tirade about the 'inebriation' with Twitter in the Vatican (read the Pontifical Council for Social Communications) that, he warns, may prove to be counter-productive.
I don't know that it will necessarily be counter-productive, because it does provide another online platform from which to spread the Christian message, regardless of its actual reach and influence. And if it attracts hate mail, think of the hate mail Jesus might have provoked if there had been Twitter in his time! You have to expect that, if you go against the mainstream as Christians do these days.
So, going by the Hippocratic principle of 'First, do no harm', I suppose the Twitter venture by the Vatican gets a passing grade for now...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/01/2013 20:39]