In the past years, Pope Benedict XVI urged priests to blog and asked Catholics worldwide to remain virtuous while they embrace social media. As reported on Yahoo News, the Pope is kicking off 2012 with a completely different message. Now, the Pope is promoting silence, silence and more silence. In his annual communications message, the Catholic leader said silence can be a “particularly powerful mode of expression” and asked his followers to consider balancing silence with social media and other distracting images and sounds.
The Pope isn’t the first person to advocate for people to cut back on their social media usage. A recent book, Alone Together, from MIT professor Sherry Turkle claims our obsession with constant tweets, Facebook news streams, and emails is a modern form of madness. She says our online interactions make us less human and isolate us from in-real-life interactions.
It’s an interesting debate that’ll continue as social networks like Twitter and Facebook begin to grow in influence. I lean on the pro-social media side of things as I enjoy interacting with other people on the Internet. I already live in an isolated area and the Internet lets me meet people I never would have met otherwise. But that’s just me, what about you? What do you think about social networking?
[Via Yahoo News; image from Shutterstock]