social network

Please Your Holiness, feed the #troll (an open letter to the Pope)

[Update Feb. 11 2013: This post has been also published in the French edition of the Huffingtonpost and featured in Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish as well as in the Catholic Herald.]

> To : Pope Benedict XVI
> From : Antonio Casilli
> Sent:  Sun Feb. 3 2013 03:52:22 PM
> Subject: What to do about Twitter trolling
>

Your Holiness,

let me start by saying that I am not a christian, plus I am not particularly appreciative of your work. I am but a modest scholar of digital cultures who has been following, with a professional eye, your recent effort to rebrand your online image. By now, the general public is aware that you and your staff operate the Twitter account @pontifex – and its multilingual permutations @pontifex_fr, pontifex_it, pontifex_es… My sources indicate that this is the brainchild of Jesuit cybertheologian Antonio Spadaro, counselor of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications 1. So it seems only obvious that the Jesuit magazine Popoli commissioned a study to assess how well your online presence has been perceived after a month on Twitter. On the face of it, you did fine. You have been sending out approximately 100 messages in 9 languages, and earned more than 2 million followers altogether. Moreover, you have generated 270,456 responses from your fellow users.

This impressive amount of comments was also used to perform a “sentiment analysis”, to determine the general attitude of the Twittersphere. About 82% of the feedback received was “neutral”, a meager 10% was positive, and 8% negative. Let me break it down for you, Your Holiness: sentiment-wise, your entrance on Twitter has been saluted by a roaring “meh”… The not so brilliant results are summarized in the following infographic:

The Pope on Twitter. Source: Oogo.com (more…)

  1. Turns out my sources were not completely accurate after all. On Twitter, jesuit theologian Antonio Spadaro clarifies that:

Knowtex, Culture Visuelle et les autres

C’est le mois d’août, tout le monde est en vacances et moi j’ai envie d’écrire un petit billet pour vous annoncer que dans le milieu de la recherche française on assiste – avec beaucoup de satisfaction – à la naissance de médias sociaux pour la mise en relation d’universitaires, étudiants, scientifiques et grand public. Ma sensibilité (exquise, vous vous en doutez) et mes intérêts (on ne peut plus éclairés, ça va sans dire) me font privilégier deux services particulièrement bien conçus : Knowtex et Culture Visuelle. L’un, plus orienté sciences exactes, et avec un penchant pour la divulgation ; l’autre plutôt sciences humaines, et  centré sur l’enseignement. Moi, je suis délicieusement (paraît-il) polymorphe, donc vous me trouvez parfois sur l’un, parfois sur l’autre.

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