A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. Imagine then the worth in words of a whole video segment! And more important, imagine the power of such a video to mobilise people into action.

Until last week few people had seen the tract of pristine land earmarked for a commercial ‘American University’, a business venture that will be financed by a Jordanian speculator. Then a video, shot by a drone, gave us breath-taking aerial views of the beauty of the land that would be taken over and forever destroyed. The footage made people realise what really was at stake.

Among those galvanised into action as a result of this video we find Archbishop Charles Scicluna who tweeted ‘Please prevent this rape’.

Will his appeal together with that of so many others fall on deaf ears?

This is just one example of the effective use of the tools of the mediatised and technologised communication environment that moulds us, our communication style, our choices and our society. As fish are immersed in water, so are we immersed, and every day more so in this environment and shaped by it. This state of affairs is glorified by some and lambasted by others. You may be surprised to find out that even such innovations as writing and printed books have been rubbished by some, though undoubtedly they were praised by others.

Socrates (the Greek philosopher not the Brazilian footballer) in Plato’s Phaedrus, tears to bits the invention of the writing. He finds no good or redeeming factor in this innovation. Only bad consequences sprung to his mind. Writing, for him, was a no-no.

When Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (later Pope Julius II) wanted a copy of Le guerre civili, he commanded a calligrapher to copy it instead of buying the printed book since in the 15th century many cultured people turned up their patrician noses on printed books.

They considered manuscripts to be a luxury made for the few as opposed to the spartan, mass produced printed versions which were considered to be good only for the vulgar populace.

Socrates and della Rovere were both highly intelligent and cultured men. The first is considered to be the father of Western philosophy and the latter a prominent patron of the arts. Their criticism stems, in fact, from their perceptiveness.

They recognised that the invention of writing, in the case of the former, and of printing in the case of the latter, would bring about the fall of the world as they knew it and a radical change in the way we live our own humanity. They were right on that count.

Among those galvanised into action as a result of this video we find Archbishop Charles Scicluna who tweeted ‘Please prevent this rape’

They were wrong, though, to believe that the world as they knew it and humanity as they lived it were the best that there could ever be. These thoughts came to my mind while reading Pope Francis’s message for the 49th World Communications Day that – unknown to most – we celebrate today.

In this message where he discussed communication and the family, the Pope makes it clear that he wants to avoid the trap that Socrates and his 15th century predecessor had fallen into because of their defence of a world that was bound to change).

“We are not fighting to defend the past”, writes Pope Francis. And then continues: “Rather, with patience and trust, we are working to build a better future for the world we live in.”

Communicating for a better future is undoubtedly a noble task. Getting there is certainly difficult particularly in a pluralistic world where there is no consensus about what makes the future a better one. The focus of the Pope’s message, that is the family, is, for starters, a contentious one. While Pope Francis has repeatedly defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman can we keep on insisting on a similar definition of the family? I doubt it; but I digress.

The Pope is right when he says that the media are a hindrance to communication in and between families “if they become a way to avoid listening to others [and] to evade physical contact”.

Tablets and smartphones are accused of doing just that particularly by those who conveniently forget that reading books is a solitary experience par excellence and the activity which more than anything else privatised the individual.

The accusation that the digital mobile communications gizmos are the parents of solitary geeks was in the 1930s levelled against television. Rudolf Arheim, an eminent film theorist, art critic and perceptual psychologist, had predicted that television would produce a generation of pathetic hermits squatting in their rooms.

This hardly happened in the case of TV and it will hardly be the heritage of the internet and the social network. It could very well be that such symptoms are not an inherent consequence of the use of media technology but a manifestation of something else.

Parents are not, for example, well informed of their children’s media use. A study just published by the Malta Communications Authority shows that 71 per cent of children use a mobile but only 58 per cent of parents think that their children do so. Is this ignorance of children’s media use the fault of the media or a symptom of a general lack of communication within families?

There is a paragraph in the Pope’s message which I find to be particularly instructive as it rightly notes that “the great challenge facing us today is to learn once again how to talk to one another, not simply how to generate and consume information.”

The commercialisation of media technology emphasises the latter as audiences are perceived to be consumers not citizens. Information as the basis of creating dialogue is much more important than information about consumption or partial and contentious presentation of information.

The industry of spin is one of the enemies of true communication within society and within the family which is the focus of the Pope’s message.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt