it applies to everyone. We all have our own hypotheses of how the world works, and those of us who are not scientists and who do not actively seek the validation of their hypotheses will perceive any facts that question their faith and contradict their beliefs as an unwelcome challenge to their way of life and a significant threat to their mental wellbeing. Everyone has the right to distract themselves from the harsh realities of life by means of light entertainment and a belief system that favours (at least on the surface) hope over fear and comfort over truth. People have a right to comfort. And that is all that MMC provides. We provide comfort to all those poor souls who find too much knowledge of the truth too heavy a burden to bear.
It had been only thanks to Mr Maddock’s religious passion—some may want to call it fanaticism—that the church had returned to the center of public attention in recent years. By following the Pope on every single one of his trips around the world and covering everything he said, everything he did down to his last fart, on our national and international TV channels and on our radio stations and in our newspapers and on our websites, we had turned him into a pop star, the kind of pop star the popes had been in the olden days before all those beautiful, young and modern pop stars, all those Justins and Brittneys and Gagas had shown us how it’s done.
Remember John Paul II? He used to be a pop star. He was a pop star in the sense that he was extremely popular, eloquent, and relatively modern for his time, i.e. the late 1970s and early 80s. But John Paul’s problem was that he overstayed his welcome by a good 20 years. His fan base aged with him, and he failed to significantly tap into the coveted younger demographic, people who weren’t even born yet when he was elected Pope. The world has changed a lot since the 1970s. Society, technology, the media, they have all made quantum leaps into the 21st century in the last two decades, but a millennia-old organization like the Roman Catholic Church was struggling to keep up and adapt to conditions that not only kept changing but that were changing at a faster rate than any time before in human history.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. Benedict XVI was the first pope to use Twitter, except he never actually used it himself which—quite frankly—was a huge mistake. In terms of public relations it was an unforgivable mistake. One of the greatest appeals of Twitter is that it gives regular, normal people like you and me direct access to celebrities by effectively eliminating the middleman. It is no coincidence that the Latin word medium literally means middle . The traditional media—newspapers, radio, and television—used to be the middlemen between celebrities such as singers, actors, artists, politicians and so on, and the common people. If you were a celebrity you talked to the media, and the media would relay your message—more or less accurately—to the rank and file. I’m asking you, why on earth would you use a service like Twitter, whose most interesting feature is the absence of a middleman, and then install another middleman yourself? It doesn’t make any sense. If you want to be on Twitter, you better do your own tweeting instead of having some halfwit intern do it for you. If you’re standing in St Peter’s Square with your hands raised in blessing the masses, and thousands of people in front of you have their iPhones lighting up with a tweet from you when you obviously haven’t been tweeting, then you’re effectively wasting all the great potential of social media. This is not the Middle Ages anymore where people would have been stupid enough to believe that as Pope you were probably powerful enough to send out a tweet without using your hands. Nowadays most people are still pretty stupid, but they’re not that stupid. And believe me when I tell you that the average stupid person does not appreciate the notion
It had been only thanks to Mr Maddock’s religious passion—some may want to call it fanaticism—that the church had returned to the center of public attention in recent years. By following the Pope on every single one of his trips around the world and covering everything he said, everything he did down to his last fart, on our national and international TV channels and on our radio stations and in our newspapers and on our websites, we had turned him into a pop star, the kind of pop star the popes had been in the olden days before all those beautiful, young and modern pop stars, all those Justins and Brittneys and Gagas had shown us how it’s done.
Remember John Paul II? He used to be a pop star. He was a pop star in the sense that he was extremely popular, eloquent, and relatively modern for his time, i.e. the late 1970s and early 80s. But John Paul’s problem was that he overstayed his welcome by a good 20 years. His fan base aged with him, and he failed to significantly tap into the coveted younger demographic, people who weren’t even born yet when he was elected Pope. The world has changed a lot since the 1970s. Society, technology, the media, they have all made quantum leaps into the 21st century in the last two decades, but a millennia-old organization like the Roman Catholic Church was struggling to keep up and adapt to conditions that not only kept changing but that were changing at a faster rate than any time before in human history.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. Benedict XVI was the first pope to use Twitter, except he never actually used it himself which—quite frankly—was a huge mistake. In terms of public relations it was an unforgivable mistake. One of the greatest appeals of Twitter is that it gives regular, normal people like you and me direct access to celebrities by effectively eliminating the middleman. It is no coincidence that the Latin word medium literally means middle . The traditional media—newspapers, radio, and television—used to be the middlemen between celebrities such as singers, actors, artists, politicians and so on, and the common people. If you were a celebrity you talked to the media, and the media would relay your message—more or less accurately—to the rank and file. I’m asking you, why on earth would you use a service like Twitter, whose most interesting feature is the absence of a middleman, and then install another middleman yourself? It doesn’t make any sense. If you want to be on Twitter, you better do your own tweeting instead of having some halfwit intern do it for you. If you’re standing in St Peter’s Square with your hands raised in blessing the masses, and thousands of people in front of you have their iPhones lighting up with a tweet from you when you obviously haven’t been tweeting, then you’re effectively wasting all the great potential of social media. This is not the Middle Ages anymore where people would have been stupid enough to believe that as Pope you were probably powerful enough to send out a tweet without using your hands. Nowadays most people are still pretty stupid, but they’re not that stupid. And believe me when I tell you that the average stupid person does not appreciate the notion
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