Have you read the Official Memorandum of the Young People’s Forum 2011 which is about Facebook and the other so-called social media?

For the ‘majority of young people… the public sphere is all online and, on the contrary, what is offline is private stuff’- Fr Peter Serracino Inglott

Sometimes an unheralded event happens which marvellously restores in an oldie like me his badly battered, not to say shattered, confidence in the up-and-coming generation.

One such unexpected event is this 26-page publication by the Kummissjoni Djoċesana Żgħażagħ (KDZ) which purports to be a summary of the opinions of some 300 young men and women who contributed to its compilation.

“The social media have rendered physical distance almost insignificant” And: “technology minimises limits of time and distance.”

These keynote phrases ringing out the death-knell of distance in cicada-like tones stirred up in my mind, fashioned mainly at Oxford over 50 years ago, memories of Alice Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

The Red Queen’s realm – as the Forum sees it mirrored in cyberspace – is constituted by two rejections. First, the very image of running on the same spot reverses the Enlightenment belief in unremitting progress in human affairs. Secondly, the public domain, from which individual personalities are to be kept out, is abolished or at least has its frontiers made fuzzy.

Youth Forum 2011 thinks Facebook (and the social media) amounts to a two-fold phenomenon. First, it is the climax of the secular process of privatisation, that is of the elimination of a common space inhabited by all citizens.

Secondly, it is decisively contributing to the development of a world made up exclusively of individuals unaware of any binding common heritage.

For the “majority of young people”, we are told, “the public sphere is all online and, on the contrary what is offline is private stuff.”

The social media enable more relationships to be entered into by individuals, but they will neverbe as full as in face-to-facecommunication.

Because of the weaker nature of the contact, much more is revealed by the individual and in that way what previously belonged to the realm of intimacy is made available to a wide circle of people. In cyberspace, as in Red Queen’s country, together with distance, the common public space vanishes and the juxtaposition of individual spaces appears instead.

From what you have said does it follow that the Youth Forum thinks that the advent of Facebook and the social media is of great importance in political life?

The forum holds that while with the traditional media such astelevision there were just a few actors who could for some reason command a wide diffusion of their views, with the social media everybody could be an actor besides being a member of the audience.

Moreover there is no longer public opinion, meaning a mass reaction, but a multitude of different opinions which are not coaxed into uniformity by the dominant pressures of elites.

On the other hand, individual personalities count for much more, even to the extent that exhibitionists and narcissistic leaders are likely to become popular, although they must not exceed certain limits in self-exposure, as Silvio Berlusconi and perhaps even Nicolas Sarkozy have done.

What does the Youth Forum say about the social media and religion?

Mainly it is an application to the area of spirituality of the basic thesis that a hyper-individualism has developed.

Thus it is said that it was the individual personality of a priest participating which counted rather than his official or ritual function.

This parallels what was said about politicians. It might even throw light on the debate about the question of Church financial compensation to the victims of paedophile priests.

Let us assume, first, that people who have suffered financial loss, for instance, through psychological disabilities in getting jobs are entitled to compensation, and secondly, that there is no unfairness in victims not receiving money when the ecclesial authorities have not been guilty of cover-ups, while money was paid when they were. The reason for financial ‘compensation’ (hardly the right word) will then be essentially to boost the spirit of the victims for them to overcome the traumas undergone.

In the pre-Facebook era, the aim would have been achieved through some kind of collective ritual ofreconciliation.

Many were impressed when after the Pope himself had spoken to the Maltese victims with tearsin his eyes, their leader saidthat although he had abandoned church-going, he emerged “aconfirmed Christian”.

Although broadcast to the whole world, nevertheless the action was carried out in a private and almost intimate context, rather than as a public ritual of reconciliation.

Equally notable for its highlighting of informality and friendly flavour, after the meeting with the Archbishop, it was said that an oral apology and a cup of tea, or gestures of the kind, were not what was wanted. Only money was deemed the fitting response to what was insistently defined as a moral offence.

This manner of thinking is surely a stark example of the result of carrying to an extreme limit the Facebook premise that there is no common world but only juxtaposition of individual spaces, with communication between them almost totally mediated by monetary exchanges.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.