In the culture of participation that is supposedly emerging, one thing is often stressed: The “people formerly known as the audience”, no longer tolerate to be reduced into passive receivers - they want to interact, customize, interfere and be taken seriously, they want to have a say and be able to influence, and they have the means to pool their resources in collective efforts to promote the changes they see fit. The power of such collectives is widely thought to cause great political and cultural change.
The rhetorics of participation and change – surrounding the web 2.0 – has implications that need to be taken into account when an organisation like the church launches new strategies of communication on the web. The fact that the church is (and is widely perceived of as) an organisation, based on a hierarchical structure and upholding a strong tradition of communicating in a disseminatory, one-way, top-down manner should not be obscured in this discussion. Over the last years, the Catholic Church has received much criticism for its alleged inability to communicate with the surrounding world in an up to date manner. This has led to several initiatives that aim at strengthening the Church’s presence on the Internet and creating channels into social media. For example, the Pope has a Facebook page and the Holy See has a Twitter account, the papal Youtube channel received worldwide attention.
In this paper, I discuss the compatibility between the church’s tradition of disseminatory communication and the dialogical and interactive aspects of participatory media.