more on "the techie nun"

Watch an interview with Sr. Judith on Robert Scoble's "Scoble Show," here.

high-tech habits

At the LIFT conference concluded a few days ago, one of the stars of the show was a nun -- Sr. Judith Zoebelein, editorial director of the Internet Office of the Holy See. In short, Sr. Judith -- a fiftysomething American nun -- is the Vatican's web mistress.

Despite wearing a nun's habit, Sr. Judith breaks the stereotype of nuns being uncool and hopelessly outdated, if not ignorant, when it comes to technology. Not only that -- her job situates her at the helm of a typically male-dominated field in a very patriarchal system. No wonder the other LIFT participants such as Robert Scoble, the prolific blogger formerly with Microsoft, just had to sit down with her for a side interview.

But the interesting thing about Sr. Judith is her take on the Internet. She believes in using the Net to build communities -- not just online communities, but real ones. In an interview with BusinessWeek last year, she was said to be working on a site that would bring Catholics together, a sort of "MySpace.com for Catholics," as the article said.

This is similar to one of the aims of journalism. When done well, journalism engages its audience and makes them citizens in the true sense of the word. Combine this with the power, speed, and convenience of the Internet, and you have a truly global online community.

As I've said before, when you strip the Internet of all its bells and whistles, what you'll get is a tool for communication and information dissemination. It lends itself to journalistic ends because of this. Sr. Judith, in the BusinessWeek interview, talks about connecting and using the same technology, albeit for a different purpose:

"For (Sr. Judith), the Net is the ultimate way to reach millions of people and to connect them with their deity. 'It's about something much bigger than myself, and it's also very Franciscan: You can touch it, you can change it, and you can touch people with it,' she says."

Does Sr. Judith have a blog, you ask? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

blogging gone global

In case the power of blogging hasn’t sunk in yet, or if you’re one of those in denial, check out Global Voices Online.

Here are some excerpts from a case study I did:

Global Voices Online (www.globalvoicesonline.org) is a “citizens’ media” project (Global Voices Online, 2006) that networks bloggers from some 160 countries around the world. Existing purely online, it makes use of a blog and other Internet technologies to enable interaction and discussion among bloggers. Most of the bloggers are from or in countries underreported by mainstream media -- i.e. countries outside North America and parts of Europe.

The project took off from a meeting of bloggers entitled “Global Voices Online: Blogging for Independent Journalists, Concerned Citizens, and Activists,” which was part of a conference called “Internet and Society 2004: Votes, Bits, and Bytes,” held in December 2004 and sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. The meeting was organized by technologist Dr. Ethan Zuckerman and former CNN correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon, both research fellows at the Berkman Center.

A manifesto states the project’s core beliefs and values -- the commitment to free speech, and aims to use the power of citizens’ media in addressing the needs of people and societies marginalized or even disenfranchised by mainstream media. (Global Voices Manifesto, 2005) The Global Voices “About” page lists the following goals:

1. to call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world;


2. to facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves; and


3. to advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

With the estimated one million visitors the site receives monthly, many of them reporters and editors from the mainstream media, Global Voices has truly created a global blogging community. Aside from this, it has helped call attention to the parts of the world that have been underreported or marginazlied in traditional/mainstream media.