Participant Comments

GEOFFREY BOISI: I’m curious: What apps or social media networks should we be on? I mean, everybody sort of knows about Facebook and LinkedIn and some of the more—initially more prominent ones, which those of us in business realize that they’re sort of passé now. What are some of the names of social media apps or communication mechanisms you are seeing that we as Church leaders should be thinking about using or interacting with in order to challenge the group in terms of our knowledge of it, and how do we go about finding out about these things?

MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN: It’s a good question, and it’s funny because I’m 30 years old, but I sometimes feel incredibly old, like when I’m still trying to learn all these new apps, because it feels like the crowds are getting younger and younger on apps such as Snapchat and Instagram, and I’m trying to keep up on learning all those. I think it’s still important to have a presence on Twitter and Facebook.

Another response came from the Bishop of Pittsburgh. So if you think of the Bishop of Pittsburgh, Bishop David Zubik, at all, you might think of him as being the lead plaintiff in the Catholic Church’s lawsuit against the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. Now, for many, that means he’s squarely in one camp. He’s a conservative. We don’t have a lot of time to think through the nuances of many issues, so that’s where he’s going to be placed in our minds. But when he released

Twitter especially, I think, is underused because, in terms of press, it’s an essential tool for journalists. That is where I get a lot of tips about stories, a lot of people responding to events that I then go to for further comments. So while it’s kind of aging out and I think it’s not as popular as it once was, it’s still a professional tool that we need to be on to engage media.

And then there’s things like Instagram, which is great for brands to promote themselves and engage with users.

Snapchat is, for those who don’t know, an app on which you can send photos and stories to people, and they automatically delete themselves after the recipient views them. And this is increasingly popular with younger people.

So it’s one of these things where you have so many resources, but you still need to be kind of on the cutting edge and experimenting with what’s coming up next.

DAVID MELANҪON: Michael is exactly right. I think the one thing I’d say— and Michael is a millennial, right? So he’s one of those illusive things that we’re all looking for in the marketing world. We’re looking for millennials. But, increasingly, marketers are also looking for the next generation, the tweens that aren’t actually millennials, because everybody wants to reach them and talk to them.

I actually think you need to be on all these places. It doesn’t mean that your message needs to be diffused or you need to be scattered. It means that you need to know where people are going today. You need to know what they’re doing, and more than that—and I think what Michael is pointing out—is you need to know how they’re consuming.

The thing about Snapchat that I find fascinating is that, yes, the images do go away, but it allows you to track your whole day. And anybody that’s a follower of yours or a friend of yours gets to see quickly in images or videos kind of what you’ve done, and more and more young people are thinking about this. They’re broadcasting their day to their friends, and they’re looking at their friends’ days. So understanding that this is the way they’re consuming media is so important.

Let’s go to really old media. Let’s go to TV. The fact that people are bingewatching, the fact that people are taking control and looking at what they want to look at, when they want to look at it is really important. So if you think about just the way they’re consuming media and being there, I think it’s important.

Facebook, they definitely get it. The people on Facebook are older. The people on Facebook are in their 40s and 50s. That’s becoming more and more the prevalent user there. That’s still a place you need to be. That’s still a community that you want to talk to. So it doesn’t mean you stop talking to them. It just means you have to be open to all these new ways to reach people.

GENO FERNANDEZ: I might take a slightly contrarian question to Michael and to David, since we have communications experts here. There is a theory that says that all of these types of social media are really limiting people’s ability to do critical thinking, and you quoted “Blessed are the poor in spirit” as the introduction to the largest, longest, sustained discourse in the Gospels from the Lord, The Sermon on the Mount. So it isn’t 140 characters. It’s four chapters, right? But, in a Snapchat and Facebook culture where you’re consuming tweets, how do we actually engage with the more substantial method of the faith, which may take more than 140 characters and take lots of explicit reflection? Is it simply an entry point, and then that’s how we get the crowds to do the serious reflection, or do you believe it’s actually part of a new apostolate?

MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN: It’s a good question and a challenge for sure. One of my responses to this kind of question is I think it’s fairly easy for a lot of people to write a lengthy essay or op-ed to try to get your point across. If you have several paragraphs, you can include a lot of sources and a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different people’s thoughts and ideas, and I don’t think that’s difficult, probably, for anyone in this room to do. I think it’s a lot harder to cut through all the noise, to offer a few words that are going to stick with you throughout the day. We’re constantly bombarded with information. When Pope Francis tweets something that sticks with me, I might think about it a couple of times during the day, and then when I have more time, look up where that line came from. And then maybe by then, I’m reading a longer document that he wrote, or I’m reading a piece of church teaching that he’s pointing to.

So, I don’t think that we can shift away from preaching the Gospel and doing our own kind of education about our faith and only follow people on Snapchat and Instagram

A Renewed Vision: Agility in a Changing Landscape and Twitter. But I go back to my point that online space is where we are, where we live much of our lives. We can’t reject that reality. We have to be part of it, and I guess we’re still figuring out the best way to invite people to take a deeper look into things.

DAVID MELANҪON: I absolutely agree. I think it’s way harder for anybody who’s tried to write a tweet that’s cogent. It’s way harder to say something in 140 characters, but at the same time, I think you’re addressing a bigger issue in our society, people losing sometimes the ability to focus, that ability to go deep and to really have the attention span necessary. In that way, you can use this as an entry point. It’s not going to solve that problem. It’s not going to make people start to read weighty tomes if they’re 14 years old.

Does anybody know what Global Citizen is? Global Citizen is an organization that of Pope Francis’ tweets is ‘Look around you. Get your face out of the phone.’ does a concert every year in Central Park. Last year, it was Beyoncé and Coldplay. We helped them launch their organization and their app, but what their app does is it allows young people, mostly, to earn points to get into a drawing to actually win a ticket to the Beyoncé concert. The tickets aren’t for sale. You have to actually earn your way into the concert, and one of the things we found is that the way you earn that—in the marketing world, this is called “gamification”— is you have to go do something. In this case, we wanted them to engage with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and we’d send out white papers on topics like women and girls. And we would ask them to read that, and there would be a way, obviously, since they’re reading on an electronic device that we’d know if they had read it before they got the points.

Now, does that mean they absorbed it? They just flicked through the pages? We don’t know, but the good news about this media is that you can learn what people are doing. That’s also the scary part, but you know where they’ve been. You know what they’ve read. You know what they’ve looked at. You know which points of your argument or your article they’re interacting with, and therefore, you can either give them more of that, or if they’re not interacting with the right stuff, you can figure out a way to re-present that to them in a different format.

I do think technology is a learning mechanism for us, certainly, as people who are trying to build organizations, and

I think that’s the good of it. Addressing the bigger issues of how to make people more contemplative in this world, I’m not sure about.

JAMES DUBIK: As the dinosaur on the panel, I wanted to come back to Geno’s question because I’m also an author. I write normally 750- to 2,000-word op-eds or essays. I’ve written quite a few, maybe 200 published essays and a couple dozen op-eds. At any rate, I find it very troubling that on the kinds of issues that I read about, generally national security issues, that the demand of the editors is less and less when the problems are more and more complex and find that the medium is enforcing less understanding, whereas the medium should enforce more.

So my conclusion from listening to both Michael and David in response is that we’re not in an either/or world. You’ve got a variety of mediums that we really have to leverage, and we can’t avoid or push back on the longer kinds of understandings and writings, or we will lose quite a bit.

PETER PERSUITTI: I’m struck by, Geoff, your thinking that social media is a little passé and what should we do, and I am encouraged by what Mike is saying about the surprising and the human aspect. And I recall years ago being a leader in an independent school in Connecticut where we had several students arrested and it was a crisis for us. And, quite frankly, we skyrocketed as a result and we became very proactive about drug abuse. And I suppose that if there’s anything I would advise, it’s that maybe as dioceses and archdioceses, we think about these opportunities for healing, for the human touch, and all of these crises are opportunities. They’re windows, and I applaud the Pittsburgh bishop for doing that sort of thing. The more you can be agile and start teaching out, the better, because unfortunately, these things are happening all the time, and we need voices of folks who can help us filter through them. And our faith is one of those great wells of hope, if you will. So just a thought in terms of the opportunity, even, for the Roundtable to be part of, to fill that void when these tragic events happen.

DARLA ROMFO: The other word that comes up for me with a lot of these apps is “narcissism.” I mean, it’s your whole life. You’re showing everybody your life every minute, and that’s exactly the opposite of what the faith is about. Everything about the faith is about silence and being self-sacrificing. I think it’s interesting that one of Pope Francis’ tweets is “Look around you. Get your face out of the phone.” I’m just thinking about how we can be reflective. Instead of buying into and trying to be just like everybody else on social media, how can you do it differently, still be active, but do it in a way that’s not narcissistic and that emphasis the way that we need to be all the things that were brought up in the previous question.

MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN: It’s a good point. I think you always have to be aware of what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to build up your own brand, your own celebrity? Are you pointing back to yourself, or are you using—in the case of Pope Francis, are you using your celebrity to point to something bigger and better? So, for him, he has an Instagram account now, for example, and it’s all pictures of himself. So is that narcissistic? Maybe, but it’s pictures of him serving the poor, embracing the disfigured, being in places with refugees. So it’s pointing to a bigger message. Do we live in a narcissistic culture?

Probably. But, again, I don’t think we can separate ourselves from that where we risk not being in front of people where they are. So it’s using this kind of technology in a way to point to the bigger message, but it is a challenge. I’ll grant you that.

DAVID MELANҪON: I also think that we run the risk—and, Darla, I totally respect what you’re saying, and given my age, I sometimes think it’s very narcissistic as well, especially when I see some of the more popular people in addition to the Pope on social media. But I think we really risk something if we dismiss most of it as narcissistic because I do think the younger people that are spending time there, they’re looking at it as a normal way of sharing. It’s the way they’re interacting. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but it is an interaction for them that feels real. And so we have to get beneath that and understand that simple narcissism is not what it’s about for a lot of the younger people that are on social media.

GEOFFREY BOISI: We have been spending a fair amount of time in our business trying to figure out how to reconcile what you’ve been saying here about social media. Somebody said something to me a couple of weeks ago particularly in terms of trying to deal with millennials and the younger generation. We have, unfortunately, in a lot of ways, lost their trust, and what this guy was saying is they make decisions differently than we did. And when they’re trying to comparison shop, they comparison shop among themselves. The other insight that I got was that it is narcissistic, but it’s a self-branding culture. And the reason why you have so many younger people going to concerts and things like that and taking selfies is to prove to each other that they actually were there, and it’s part of a self-branding thing in the way that they communicate and think about things.

And so if we want to regain the younger generation to the Church, we’ve got to learn about this, and that’s not to say that we dumb down what we do. But we have to figure out how to do it differently, to engage them where they are and try to reshape that and deepen it and bring it up, but I have to say myself, in all of the businesses that we’ve ever been in, we’ve always tried to figure out how to use technology as a mechanism to enhance the mission and the business that we are in. And that’s all we’re really trying to do here is to educate each other and to expose each other to that—both what Geno and you have said are an important part of the challenge. But I think what David and Michael have been saying is that we really do have to learn how the different generations learn and make decisions in order to figure out how to engage with them.

BISHOP THOMAS DOWD: A bit of personal history, I was the first priest in Canada to have a blog—and if you look at the back of my business card, it’s got all of my social media contacts on it. So I really believe in the importance of this. A little insight from my experience, if I may, and I think it touches on Geno’s point and Darla’s point. When the whole blogging reality started, it was very important for bloggers to know that they had people offering comments on their blog. They wanted whatever they put up there to initiate a conversation. When newspapers took over the blogging format, they started to use it with their newspapers. They wanted the same thing until they found out that a whole lot of those people put really nasty, disgusting, horrible things, and so you see a shift away from that. Either they don’t do it at all, or they shifted to self-selecting groups, like they use Facebook as the commenting medium.

I bring that up because there are really two ways I have seen of using the social media. One is to push out a message, and I have heard a lot of that discussed today, how we use it to get out our message, but the second is how to create a community around a message. So you can tell which way social media is being used depending, in my experience, on what kind of commenting possibilities you find. If the commenting possibility is we don’t want it or we want it in the manner that we have to monitor the least, then it’s really about pushing out a message. But when you see the person who puts up the original post, then moderating the conversation afterwards, you’re actually creating a community of engagement around a particular message. It’s extremely intensive, which is why once I was made a bishop, I actually had to drop that because I just didn’t have the time in my calendar.

But what people are looking for is both truth and empathy. I think the communities that people build around Snapchat, showing their friends to each other, that kind of thing—how many times when there’s a crisis, suddenly, the Facebook background image gets overlaid with the flag of France after the terrorist attack in Paris or what have you or Orlando, the rainbow flag? They are looking to build communities of empathy, and they’re asking each other, “What should I think?” Very few people are saying why you should think it and actually engage the thought process. Like what Geno pointed out, how do you get people to start to think critically, I think you can in that medium but only if you’re willing to invest in the ongoing conversation. If it’s about getting out a message and then moving on to the next message, then people will absorb it as, okay, this is yet another message that I am supposed to absorb and figure it on my own, and they do what everybody else does. They talk to their friends and say, “What do you think?” If, on the other hand, we engage the message, a bit like teachers engage a classroom, with empathy, bringing truth with empathy, that shifts the whole nature of the conversation itself. It becomes more like the cocktail party we had last night, where people wander around. They talk to each other. They meet each other, but they engage with each other. And so our social media effort, to the extent to which we see the difference between those two approaches, the pushing out the message will always be necessary because crises will hit, and people will want to know what we think right away. They’re already processing through all the stuff that’s happening. But to the extent to which we’re trying to initiate a conversation, that’s where we’ve got to be willing to stick around and keep the discussion going and keep animating that discussion.

So different tools are good for different aspects around that, but I think communities seeking truth with empathy, that’s a key—I guess almost a kind of measurable you want to look at it, and, one of the factors I see is how we engage the conversation and comments. And I’ll tell you, a lot of people read the comments. They won’t read them if it’s full of bile because it’s disgusting. They don’t want to swim in that, but they will read the occasional angry comment if they see the angry comment there had a point. And what they look for is how you answer, and that’s significant.

I’ll conclude with one quick story. I wrote a blog post once on the whole process of marriage annulments, and, boy, did I get an angry response from somebody who had a whole crisis around that in his personal life, and it was really an angry comment. So I thought, “Do I delete it? Everybody will see that I deleted it. I’ll have to explain why I deleted it. I might as well keep it up there, but then how do I engage it? How do I respond to it?” And the manner of engaging it actually affected people more than the engagement in some ways. They said, “Bishop, this person was hurting, but you engaged them in a way that was respectful,” and most of the people who said that to me didn’t say it on the blog because they afraid of him blasting them. They just sent me private messages. But I realized there’s an invisible community around these issues. It’s about taking what’s under the service. There’s an iceberg effect. We only see the top 10 percent, but the other 90 percent is there. That’s the group we want to engage, but we’ve got to do it by engaging them. Thank you.

THOMAS HEALEY: I think the Bishop’s comments was so thoughtful, I’m a little reluctant to follow after that. And I do want to change the topic a little bit to branding and how does the Church brand itself, and indeed, who thinks about branding the Church, and who creates the brand? It’s difficult, and the Pope obviously doesn’t have time to do that. And the anecdote I would give you, last week I had the pleasure of taking most of my grandchildren on a Disney cruise, highly recommended to anybody who has grandchildren. But we went to an informal Mass last Sunday, and the priest who just happened to be on the boat with his family in his homily talked about branding. And he said, “Look where we are, and look at Disney and the brand that Disney has created, and look at Mickey Mouse and what kind of brand that is. And how should the Catholic Church think about branding? How can we, which is a much more powerful spiritual experience and world experience than Disney—how can we—can we learn anything out of that in terms of how we are perceived and how we create perception of the Church in the world, in today’s world?”

We engage the message, a bit like teachers engage a classroom, with empathy, bringing truth with empathy, that shifts the whole nature of the conversation itself.

JAMES DUBIK: Thank you for that comment, Tom. That is a perfect lead-in to our group table discussions. Thank you.