Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The Pope Tweets in Latin - Using McLuhan to read language and prestige in the reception of microblogging

The Pope Tweets in Latin.




(Or alternately, for those who would prefer English:)



This, when thought about, is a bit of a mind blowing statement. The pope, the head of an organized religion, is sharing sharing his thoughts to millions and millions of followers (both Catholic and non-Catholic), in a language most of them are unlikely to understand. And what is even more mind blowing, no one seems to have questioned it.

But this acceptance doesn't mean that it isn't without interest. Using Marshall McLuhan's sentiment that the "medium is the message" one is given the opportunity to look at the Pope Francis's latin language tweets in a new and different light. {One can look at the Pope’s latin tweets thru McLuhan’s (ideas/paper/sentiment) and see that it reflects a new relation with Web 2.0, and the prospects of text being remediated and commented upon.

Let's look at a specific example of this. Here is a single tweet from the pontifex Latin and English feeds respectively from July 2nd.







It carries the sentiments of the encyclical, "Laudato Si," focused on climate change and sustainability which was released earlier in May

These tweets are for the most part a literal translation of one another (keeping in mind the issues always posed by translation). And the medium itself, the tweet, are the same for the most part in both accounts (and on all of the Pontifex' varied language accounts). We see the same @pontifex who speaks sparsely, generally only once every few days, who doesn't publicly respond to his followers directly (no use of the @), and who only expresses what seems to be very exacted thoughts. But this does not mean that the response has been the same.

As of October 15th the English language tweet has 9.477 Retweets and 14,250 Favorites. But aside from the metrics, one of the most striking things about the mediation and remediation in response to this tweet is that although the pope never interacts with his audience, the format and nature of twitter as a public platform allows for readers to do so, encouraged by more common situations in which they are heard.

As we see from some examples of responses:
















Here, a variety of points are being made. Some, like the statements made by "@CHRISTIANSPOOK1," attack or defend the church as an institution, while others (such as "@THEWooddude" tweet) serve to condemn or condone the individual presence of Pope Francis within the church - seeing him as a corrupting or redeeming factor of the church or the Christian tradition as a whole, and yet others further try to ask for the Pope to become involved in their own affairs - either to intercede in his prayers, or to become involved as a secular force.

With the Latin tweet, we see a tiny, tiny presence in comparison to the english side. With 113 Retweets, and 127 Favorites as of October 15th, the relative community in which the pope's views are spread to seems to have a much different culture. This is also present within the responses which he received, to this tweet, which were almost entirely in concordance with his thoughts, appearing in Latin (both in original writing and in the citation of biblical quotations), Italian, and a variety of other european languages. Below are a few examples of these:




("Ita Vero" would most literally translate as something like "It is so" (It is the truth))




("It is necessary to serve that garden which the  almighty gave [to us];
so that the enjoyment of all is made able to be given." more or less - "Fructus" ("enjoyment") has some rather meaningful shades of variation within its translations.)




(Or even some in ... Esperanto? I can't seem to tell what this is exactly saying.)

So what do we make of such different communities? They both demonstrate how the way in which the same basic communication can be interacted with differently, created mostly from the sense of the author and their role in the network or community. The Pope, in this, can be seen as almost two different authors, sparking different appreciation, hatred, or any other mix of responses. And this isn't too say that this is a particularly new thing - the way in which an author, or text, or word is construed will always appear differently in different communities - as we can see in the words of Semanticist S.I. Hayakawa from his 1940s text "Language in Thought and Action." In this text, he describes the origins of a communal payment system in two different communities, "A-Town" and B-ville" - which alternately established this as a form of "relief" and "social insurance," with differing results in each of their own communities as a result, although they were identical. (Hayakawa 3-14) As Hayakawa states:

"This story has been told not to advance arguments in favour of "social insurance" or "relief" or for any other political and economic system, but simply to show a fairly characteristic sample of language in action. Do the words we use make as much a difference in our lives as the story of A-town and B-ville seems to indicate?" (Hayakawa 12)

What is different here though, is that the realm of the internet and social media allows for the author to be identified in a whole new context. While prior, the author would require a distinctly separate identity (a different name in many senses) in order to be differentiated like this, the network through which these networks transmit means that by the mediation and remediation of the author's work (the Pope's tweets), the text becomes more and more grounded in whatever the community it is sensed in - in a sense, the Latin speaking Pope becomes more and more the Latin speaking Pope, and the English speaking Pope becomes more and more the English speaking Pope. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, who knows, but if the audience is only interacting with a single "author" (presumably the case for the English language audience), then they're being limited in how they receive and understand the figure.


Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1941. Print.

"Laudato Si" Holy See. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 24 May 2015. Web. 19 October 2015. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html


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