Are you following the Pope?
Yeah, me either. But over 800,000 people are, and he’s only been tweeting for one day!
So far he seems to be tweeting out questions and then answering them himself. Which I like. I might start doing that myself. Lots to learn from the Pope, I suspect.
Anyway, most interesting has been noting that @Pontifex (cool name, though an obvious bite off @Skrillex fame – is nobody original these days?) is following nobody.
Following 0? How come?
Turns out he’s got a great model for Twitter holiness. The Dalai Lama! According to BusinessWeek.com:
Why doesn’t the Pope follow anyone?
The choice between following and not following was partly because we noticed the Dalai Lama didn’t follow anyone. How do you decide who do you follow? That’s one reason why Facebook (FB), where you have to consciously decide who is and who isn’t a friend, wouldn’t be the best medium. We could have looked at following cardinals and bishops but then what?
It’s actually a good point. Where would it end? If the Pope is going to follow one bishop, he has to follow all bishops. And the Cardinals. Then some of the more famous priests. But what about the regular, everyday priests? Father Brian at St. Francis de Sales over on State Street? Should the Pope follow him? Then we have to talk about Anglican Priests and that’s a whole other can of worms. Episcopalian worms.
What do you think of @Pontifex? What questions would you like to tweet to the Pope?
Do you think that God’s Word can be spread via the Internet?
How about the analogy posed by the Pope’s Social Media Guru on BusinessWeek.com?
It’s almost like the equivalent of the old marketplaces where Jesus went to engage people. That’s where we have to be, with all of its ambiguities and difficulties, because that’s where the people are.