LIFT07: Sister Judith and local communities

Running notes from the LIFT07 conference in Geneva.

Wearing a Franciscan habit, Sister Judith Zoebelein - who heads the digital activities of the Vatican - talks about the importance of symbols online, and how symbols are primary to the Church (see this recent BusinessWeek story on her). She launched the Vatican website at Christmas 1995, then a simple site, mostly an archive, but it made news around the world, thousands of e-mails came in. "This is because the Church is a network. In their local situation, Catholics already felt connected to the Pope in some way, now they had a chance to express that connection". She asks whether the Internet can foster real-life exchanges, talks about an e-learning project at the Vatican which will soon offer a course on the meaning of suffering, where students will have to meet face-to-face as part of the program, and concludes that the Internet can be used to make manifest in your local community the global community we live in and can no longer escape.

Quote: "When I use Skype and look down and see that there are 6 other million people using it, I somehow feel part of a pseudo-community, of that small group of people that have decided to stay away from the telecom sharks".