Pope Benedict XVI praised new communications technologies like Twitter on Tuesday (Jan. 24), saying that even “concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible,” can convey “profound thoughts.”
Benedict did not explicitly refer to Twitter in his yearly message for World Communications Day, but Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told reporters that “it’s safe to say that a reference to ‘tweets’ is there.”
My take is that this:
[blockquote]even “concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible,” can convey “profound thoughts.”[/blockquote]
isn’t very helpful without the rest of the context:
[blockquote] In his message, the pope also focused on the value of silence in communication, saying that without it, meaningful messages “cannot exist.”
“When messages and information are plentiful,” he wrote, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary.”[/blockquote]
That’s the essence of a contemplative approach to life.
Apologies for the engineering analogy – if a control system responds too strongly or too quickly to what it’s trying to control (or influence – compare twitter), the likely result is chaos or catastrophe.