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DIGITAL EVANGELIZATION
IS A SOCIAL, LINGUISTIC,
NEW MEDIA EVENT!
Julian Fox
Revision History
Revision 0.1
20 April 2009
JF
:email:jbfox@sdb.org
Part 1: new, social media event
St Francis de Sales is at least one forerunner of the daily newspaper in France and one of France’s early pamphle-
teers (85 pamphlets gathered under the title Catholic Controversy which he began publishing on 25th January
1595). Faced with a hostile audience of renegade Catholics who had gone over to Calvinism, Francis adopted a
simple measure by way of response: combatting the errors of the Reformation and calling his flock to re-conver-
sion by means of pamphlets he wrote and mass-produced then delivered personally to the often closed doors of
villagers and mountain dwellers in the Chablis, his chosen mission territory over-looking the beautiful Lac Leman
which now divides France from Switzerland.
Combine this memory with Don Bosco’s desire to spread good books, and his every effort to write and mass-
produce good literature of all kinds, from biographies to refutation of Waldensian errors, to the Salesian Bulletin,
and it must be evident that the Salesians of Don Bosco have a thorough publishing pedigree to be proud of. Yet this
very pedigree can be a trap if it is interpreted in old media terms alone. The world of communications has changed
dramatically from 16th or 19th century pamphleteering and printing. Today our messages have the Internet for
their highway and the Web as their carrier.
The social factor
We have the power of social media, which might once have been mass and broadcast media but which now, in
narrowcast forms have converged with low cost and even no cost technologies to help any individual publish
influentially, accessibly, and in a way that scales from mailing lists for a restricted few to a million YouTube
viewers overnight. As I write, the world is still marvelling at the overnight success of Susan Boyle’s video clip.
Susan Boyle is the frumpy, smiling, ordinary face of the online sensations of the 21st century. The 47 year old
never-been-kissed (she says) Scottish woman was discovered to have the voice of an angel when she appeared last
week on a British Television show. Within days she became the poster girl of how the internet age has re-written
the rules of overnight fame. Within a week her clip was viewed by more than 20 million on YouTube.
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Be it Francis or John or Susan, there is a common factor, the social factor. We do well to wonder about the personal
factor in the formation of young digital natives, and for that matter older digital immigrants and even digital
tourists, but we err badly if we overlook what personal, convergent media are in function of: new social media.
New social media, as understood in today’s digital culture, enable every user to be a publisher, yet this very factor
is often overlooked, or rather the power of the movement towards social media is often overlooked by the average
individual. New social media may be changing the ways we organise society since they enable everything from
loose confederations of people solving problems and sharing solutions, to individuals reaching a global audience
when they want to or need to.
Given our publishing and pamphleteer heritage as Salesians of Don Bosco, we want to and need to reach that
global audience.
Evangelize the new continent
Something is changing. New social media have enabled new and strengthened relationships. Consider that I could
be writing this for someone in Argentina who wishes to think up an appropriate web space for a Salesian youth
movement, but am writing it from Australia to also share it with Salesian publishers from all around the world in
Rome. Consider too that new social media have brought about a new view of centralised institutions who have
controlled publishing in the past. Today I can produce a website, for nothing, as good as media magnate Rupert
Murdoch might produce one for the millions he has to spend on it.
It must be self-evident, then, that Salesian publishing on the web today needs to take account of and abide by
the conventions of new social media publishing. The opportunity beckons and will continue to beckon; it will
not go away any time soon. The conventions involve a high degree of interactivity via an increasing range of
technologies. These can be described in varying terms: as web 2.0, user-generated content, social networking,
peer-to-peer, one-to-many, many-to-many and perhaps in other ways too. Social media publishing forms today
include personal publishing like weblogs, email, instant messaging; collaborative publishing like wikis or online
APIs; social network publishing like Facebook, MySpace; feedback and discussion as in forums; aggregation and
filtering as we find with RSS, and other personalised media like social bookmarking, tagging; widgets and mashups
where content can be packaged from other sources or newly generated; personal markets like EBay.
Pope Benedict XVI has used a happy phrase in his 2009 message for World Social Communications Day. He has
invited the young people of the world to "evangelize the new continent", by which he means the universal digital
culture they inhabit. Almost certainly unknown to him at the time he wrote this, a book has been published in
English this year bearing the title: [[Content Nation]] and yes, the square brackets are part of the title. It is by
John Blossom, Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, 2009. Blossom estimates, with the help of the authoritative
Alexa.com, that we now have via YouTube, MySpace, Facebook on the one hand, and any other form of social
media like SMS or even email on the other, a new nation of content with an estimated (2008) population of around
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73 million people. That puts it on a par with the population of a European nation like Italy. If this new nation
or continent is to be evangelized, we already have the indication from an earlier Pope that it will require new
evangelization with its appropriate techniques. I am suggesting that new social media publishing is one of those
techniques.
This new nation or continent has a common language, programming, but with the advent of wikis, weblogs (blogs)
and the search engine, which has levelled the playing field, the ordinary web and new media publisher has little
need to know the intricacies of the language, since other aspects of today’s technology make that almost as simple
as point, type and click. But of course if the user does gain more fluency in the language, then the power to use
it increases almost exponentially.
Salesian publishing in the digital era will continue to have a strong paper base, but it must also now take on
a web base, and the important realisation (not yet fully realised) is that the two can co-exist but must not be
confused. The particular power of social media publishing is to increase access, influence and audience. In terms
of evangelization these are powerful tools.
Access, influence and audience
What is so different about new social media in publishing terms? They get their value from their ability to cre-
ate countless contexts for content which are influential and highly scalable, far more than traditional media can
achieve. They affect the social order differently. A myth that should be quickly put to rest is that such publishing
is chaotic. New social media abide not by the law of the jungle, but by the law of the campfire. Engage with
new social media; plunge in rather than merely dipping your toes and you will see how they handle conflict and
competition via codes of conduct, protocols and peer moderation. One may of course reject all these, and then the
result becomes chaotic, but communication of that kind inevitably does not last.
A useful metaphor for thinking about the relationships amongst social media is the starfish. Our organisational
thinking is rather too much directed to the spider instead! A spider has 8 legs, it it could survive with one of these
cut off, but it also has a head, and the spider will not survive if we cut off its head! The starfish, on the other hand
is a distributed animal. Cut off one of its protrusions and you have two starfish! The centre is not the centre! This
distributed, networked creature helps us understand how social media are different from more traditional media.
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The social media product never, in a sense, leaves the factory. This means it is a true project. Indeed, and I can
speak to this from personal experience, there is the phenomenon of the so-called long tail. The term comes from
a study which saw the economic benefits of online material long after the more material products which are fixed
in time and place have ceased to attract. But the effect of the long tail in digitalised online products is that they
can be updated regularly, and are accessible to millions of small markets due to their wide distribution capacity
and general openness. Change the model from one of economics to one of evangelization and we see the potential.
My experience of the long tail is that a book published online but not advertised, found precisely the right readers
who were then prepared to use the material effectively for purposes of evangelization, and were prepared to outlay
the funds required to do this in a major way. The exercise was never about personal financial gain, but creating
influence. It worked.
Another important difference is that in social media, content is seen in context, where context is defined as an
audience that values the content. Traditional paper publishing pushes the water of content through the pipe of
printing technology, leaving it to people to come to the tap when they need it. In the case of the Salesian Bulletin,
the tap is often the Salesian community upon whom the distribution of the SB depends, so maybe we extend
the metaphor to a garden sprinkler instead of a tap! Whereas new social media publishing, so widely and easily
distributed (no Rector or Salesian community needed here), aims to put content more directly into value contexts
by building a closer relationship between the content and its audience. The key factor here is that the value of
the content really depends on the audience’s perception of that, and to some extent on the way they experience
it, something which can be varied through multimedia.
Think of how the Salesian Bulletin is usually published around the Salesian world. It tries for a wide audience
but in a specialised context, the Salesian Family. The choice of wide audience may be motivated by two factors,
one being of course the spread good books motivation of its founding publisher, but possibly also the desire to
attract funds to maintain and further the Salesian mission. To a large extent the value of the traditionally published
Salesian Bulletin depends on the work of the editor and the distributors. Think now of how a new social media
online Salesian Bulletin, or for that matter any Salesian website will try to increase the value of its content by
working on its context in a way that the paper edition cannot (due to its accessibility, scalability, and its influence
potential). The Salesian Bulletin or the interactive, Web 2.0 website with its potential for user-generated content,
rapid exchange, now becomes even more the content for a networked vast movement of people who share a com-
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mon motivation, and it therefore has an increased range of potential micro-contexts within that vast movement,
since it can respond more flexibly to them as they arise.
Influencing a conversation
I guess one of the fundamental differences, one which I have been hinting at all along, is that social media pub-
lishing is rather more about influencing a conversation between people than dictating some imagined results to
them, no matter how good or fundamental or desirable we believe those results to be. This presents any hierar-
chically organised institution with a not-so-subtle challenge! We Salesians are perhaps too used to dictating the
results via legitimate forms of traditional publishing. But what happened within traditional publishing at the time
of the invention of the printing press between two centralized groups, Church and Publishers, is now extended
to the mass of humanity, so it has become decentralized or democratized, but the result is similar. Church lost a
great degree of control to what became conventional publishing. New social media are more adept at guiding a
conversation than dictating a message. Think about that and its implications for Salesian digital publishing. The
implications cannot be easily overridden; instead they must be worked with.
Social media comprises two terms. The latter term, media, tends to dominate our thinking overmuch. Media means
broadcast or narrowcast technology. But it is also true that new media technology has become much more people
friendly, so let’s focus a little more on the social. One hears this appeal anyway, as I recall from a recent meeting of
Social Communications delegates when a traditional Salesian publisher made just that point: "Let’s not overlook
the social side of communications; Salesians are well trained in ordinary communication skills". Of course he
was pointing to the danger of over-fascination with media of any kind, and under fascination with real face-to-
face communication, but his point has other implications. We also need to translate our nicely honed social skills
into new social media outlets.
If the Salesian is good at social skills, we now need to do some re-skilling to convert all that to profit also from
social media which are as much communication patterns revisited and enabled by technology as they are simply
the technology itself.
Of the new audiences we can reach out to, some are travelling in the same direction as us, though for different
reasons. Or they may be going in different directions, but with compatible motivations. If Don Bosco had already
indicated that we need to help people join forces for the glory of God and the salvation of souls and would have
been prepared to tip his hat to the devil to achieve that, he might have even genuflected to social media with its
enormous potential in this field!
Having focused on the term social media thus far, let me now take it as understood that I am referring to Salesian
websites and other manifestations of the social media phenomenon, though I am certainly indicating that the
websites will essentially involve some if not all the new technology possibilities in this regard. A Salesian Bulletin
online will need to be another Salesian website of the social media kind, not a fish-with-feet confusion of old
and new media.
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Salesian new media publishing creates third spaces where people congregate and where local influence can become
global influence. It will invite people into public space in a way similar to the better known social networking sites,
but it will do so in a way that can be undeniably Salesian, reclaiming that public space to help define a new sense
of society in Salesian and religious terms. Habermas, who had long argued that religious people had to translate
themselves into the secular to inhabit the public sphere, has now shifted strongly to the view that they may and
should explain themselves in their own terms. Democratic society depends on it!
Facing the consequences of new social media publishing
New media are about having influence over others through publishing. It follows that they affect power structures
in human groups, especially groups already prone to publishing! A traditional editor is likely to be suspicious of
new media publishing because it is likely to diminish the power the editor appears to have. This does not mean
anarchy, or rule by the mob. It may mean something as simple as a more collaborative or team management, where
members of the team may in fact be some of the users who emerge as leaders, or catalysts, or major contributors
rather than being picked from central administration for that role. The experience has been that social media thrives
when influence is based on what the participants (those we might have once termed the readers) choose to have
as influence over their participation. This does not mean that the central organization, in this case the Salesian
Congregation, no longer has power in its particular new media publishing venture. What it means is that this power
is now exercised in a different context, a context where we can assume that the users are using the venture because
they want to build a closer relationship, which becomes an invitation to study how influence in both directions
may be exercised.
The challenge is to do with Salesian new media publishing what it offers as its greatest opportunity: finding the
right persons at the right time in the right contexts so they will pay attention and trust what is being offered.
This challenge involves insights into new media design.
Part 2: language event
New media should be structured by invisible underlying patterns that connect image, sound and text into mean-
ingful wholes. We are used to the linear structure of human languages. New media language is best expressed
by non-linear models. But these non-linear models are all accessible to us, since we are all speakers of a natural
human language.
And here lies another of the major differences between traditional paper publishing and new media publishing.
The traditional publisher’s time and effort is taken up with collecting text and pictorial material, and arranging
that according to long-established layout principles. The editor may need or want to edit the text and images, and
will do so according to intuitive understandings and competence with language and layout.
In the case of new media design, these intuitive understandings and competencies with respect to language will
need to be more explicit, because the task involves two separate translations of either existing or implicit (i.e.
lying behind the existing design, even if never written down) textual material. The first translation is from natural
language into the underlying patterns expressed as a non-linear model; the second translation is of this to the
interface. Avoid those two steps by simply intuiting a web (or CD/DVD) design, or worse by asking some Firm
with no real knowledge of our Salesian language to do it, and the result is more likely to be a traditional publishing
effort masquerading as a web one. Fish with feet!
A web page may involve text, images or other media (audio or video), but it invariably must tell a story. This story
may be mostly in text, in which case the textual element is explicit, though already a translation of an underlying
text pattern into a narrative style interface, or it may be partly or almost hardly at all in text, in which case the
textual element becomes implicit, and expressed through image, sound, video with or without some text.
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At this point the new media designer (who is often, in Salesian circles, the webmaster) needs to call on his or her
mother tongue skills! We know the basic structures of our language, and that verbs, nouns and other grammatical
categories give us all kinds of information. It is this information which now becomes crucial for new media design.
I am writing this text in English, but it will eventually be translated into other languages. Some aspects of gram-
matical categories and relationships are universal, others are particular (e.g. some languages write right to left).
But the native speaker will understand and have studied these. If not, he (or she) should not be designing websites!
Language is patterned to represent three broad types of meaning: Ideational (information), interpersonal (interac-
tive), textual (achieved by foregrounding, where we highlight something, perhaps by first or unusual position in
a sentence, coherence, where the story holds together or makes sense, and cohesion, which is a system particular
to grammar for signalling relationships, like pronouns or other reference). There are systems of choices that the
web designer can make for each of these, choices which will be driven by both communicative purposes and the
target audience. In fact, making these choices is what we will call the first translation. They are choices to do
with meanings shared by the conventions of language and the people who speak those languages in, as we have
said earlier, certain contexts. For the Salesian web designer and user, the Salesian story and mission is what adds
certain value to language-in-context.
The first translation
A website’s or a CD/DVD’s contents involve meanings which are derived either from real text or implied text. If
I am faced with turning a printed product into a web site, for example the printed version of the Salesian Bulletin,
I will have failed new media criteria (except the desire to have a digital archival repository) if I simply convert the
real, explicit text and images to pdf and present this as the Salesian Bulletin online. Instead what I need to do is
to first analyse the printed text(s) for the way their grammatical categories suggest particular meanings. This will
involve semantic relationships as expressed by verbs (e.g. having or being, part of, kind of, comparison, and so
on), or nouns and their position in the sentence as subject, object, actor, agent, and so on. Then I need to look at
the use of images and their relationship to the text and its meanings. In the end, it is desirable for a web designer to
have studied how his or her language handles cohesion and coherence. There are any number of good textbooks
available under the general headings of either or both discourse analysis, text linguistics in many of the world’s
languages. Study in this area will repay well.
However, no need to panic at this point! The best thing to do is to avoid too much detail and spend time with the
already given text or the idea that you would express in text, considering its overall structure. What stands out? Is
it fundamentally a classification of material, in which case use a tree diagram to represent it, or lots of attributes
of a central idea, in which case use a star, or is it a comparison of entities according to their attributes, in which
case use a table, or all kinds of different relationships in which case a network or combinations of models (most
texts will end up being this latter). Do not overlook a basic Given-New and/or Ideal-Real possibility either.
If I do not have explicit text as a starting point, and am instead wanting to start up a new website from scratch, I
do actually need to turn my ideas into explicit text, to write a paragraph or paragraphs, and then analyse what I
have written as suggested above. The level of analysis involved does not have to be to the degree that the trained
linguist might do. We are not speaking of a university degree in linguistics here but a deeper appreciation of the
structure of one’s own language as natural speaker. Otherwise how would we translate textual/image meanings
into new media interfaces?
The meanings that I extract are now turned into non-linear models. This two-phase analysis (meanings and models)
thus far is the first translation. There is a finite list of non-linear models:
• Given-New: My explicit text (originally explicit or ideas ultimately converted into such) presents information
which includes the given or the already known (and usually unproblematic). In web design this is usually placed
on the left. The new, on the other hand is unknown, a challenge, and is placed on the right. This scheme works
similarly for images. Speakers of right to left languages will work in reverse. A navigation list on the left is
usually given material, known material, while other links, for example to other sites (the unknown or even
problematic or future in this context) are on the right. The links themselves then are given with respect to their
information on another page, which is new, so the Given-New non-linear model is three dimensional as well.
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• Ideal-Real: The more idealized versus the details, or documentation, or the real. The Ideal is usually found on
the top of the page and the detail or documentation below. This scheme is found also in images such as certain
religious images (think of an image of the Virgin on a statue, with someone standing looking at it - below, in the
image). Advertising also exploits this model. In a website the Institution’s logo or key personage (Don Bosco?)
may be found in the top-left corner of the page (also combines with the Given-Real model then). Where a site
has both image and text it often has the image on the top, and the text below. Major task buttons will be found
at the top (ideal) and subsidiary task buttons below (real - practical).
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• Star: (centre-periphery; nucleus-satellites). This model is mostly a relationship of characteristics, attributes or
material which defines identity (modes of being and having, or actions, activities). It is often also used for a
splash page. The star format can combine with Given-New and Ideal-Real. A common way of navigating is
with an alphabetical index put on left (given) with less usual and more innovative navigation modes (maybe
a gallery) on the right.
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• Tree: The tree model classifies into hierarchies. The semantic relation is always one of inclusion: kinds of or
part of. Trees lend themselves to demonstrating differences. But careful here: tables of contents in books tend
to be trees only in a physical sense. When a book’s contents are analysed for semantic relationships they tend to
be complex non-linear models which I will explain further on. A frequent error in web design is to take a book
idea of navigation, work with a tree and think that this ensures clear semantic relationships. It usually does not.
• Table (Matrix): Tables are used for comparing different items of information. Key elements may be listed
vertically. Attributes may be listed horizontally. This non-linear model is good where there are lots of attribute
details involved.
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• Network (web): This model is good for showing relationships between items that are not hierarchical (not
trees) and that are distributed (not stars). Relationship between nodes can be a is like b, a combines with b, a
co-occurs with b, a does something to b or something else of the kind. Some nodes can be more important than
others because they have more links, so there is not total equality in network models.
There can also be complex non-linear models where it might be the tree, or star, or table or network that is the
main component, but another model or models is/are also involved. How do we tell all this? Again, it goes back to
a careful reading of the explicit or implicit text, and a certain degree of interpretation of this. Extracting non-linear
models from text is never intuitive. We need to learn a new skill, one which linguists always apply: look at the first
paragraph, the first sentences in the paragraph, the first clauses in sentences - these will usually give us the required
information. But as indicated earlier, it is up to the designer what level of analysis to apply - and probably it only
needs to be basic, leaving out what might often be very complex non-linear models. The important thing is to
clearly express the semantics of a text in an appropriate non-linear model which is consistent with those meanings.
The second translation
Now comes the interesting part from the web designer’s point of view, turning the non-linear model into a new
media product. This translation consists usually of two parts, though it is possible to telescope these into one:
storyboard, product itself. The storyboard is a sketch of text and image with indications of which pages lead to
which.
Second translations are motivated by the model and the target audience. The list of possibilities is finite at one
level but of almost infinite creative range at another. The finite list of possibilities is as follows:
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• Implicit and explicit: An implicit second translation converts part or even all of the non-linear model back into
linear text. This could be text somewhere on the screen or text expressed by navigation links (underlined words
or nav buttons or images). In this case the nodes in the non-linear model are being re-expressed on screen or
parts of the screen and the relations between them are links. However, note that the precise relationship between
two nodes will not be expressed simply by clicking from one page to the other, therefore it has to be expressed
visually on the page from which the link proceeds. The relations might also be expressed by juxtaposing text
and image or image and image-text. Explicit translations use a variety of ways to express the model
• Overt and covert: In overt translation, the non-linear relations are translated iconically into a form resembling
the non-linear model itself, so for example if the non-linear model is a star, then something that looks like a star
appears on the screen, even if it is not exactly a star. There are various types of covert translation:
• navigation (device, bar, or underlined words; the nav bar itself determined in various ways, for example as
a tree, achieved by relative positioning, typeface, font)
• interface (headings, or by another non-linear model such as Given-New, image processes such as a familiar
and less diagrammatic form. It could be a classificational process. The relationship in the semantics remains
explicit but the translation is covert). Remember that non-linear models represent how we understand texts.
New media products should be based on a well-thought-out non-linear model adequately representing the
underlying semantic structure of a text or domain. But the second translation also requires some familiarity
with graphicacy - language, visual communication and navigation devices.
• Metaphorical: A metaphor involves transference on the basis of a perceived analogy. These translations
may involve an image process or may even be based on a narrative scenario. An excellent example of this
was achieved some years ago by Belgian Salesians when they produced an interactive CD meant to tell the
Salesian story for young people.
Some clues as to second translation possibilities
Given-New does not translate into covert or metaphorical forms, it seems.
Stars are often overt, but they can be covert in various forms, and metaphorical. How many metaphors of a star
can you think of?
Trees as overt do not seem to have taken hold much in web design, though it would be interesting to take another
look at the Strenna video for 2009 to see how it has been achieved, then think of how to represent the same ideas
on a website. Covert trees are amongst the most common of web designs but often do not realise the semantic
relations and tend to be like books. Implicit translation of tree into text is common, or into nav buttons. It could
also be achieved through an arrangement of headings. Trees can also be translated into other non-linear models
(Given-New, Ideal-Real, image process, metaphor)
Beware covert trees masquerading as semantic but in fact just showing physical inclusion as in a book index or
table of contents.
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Tables must not lose their semantic comparison relationship. They could translate into text, juxtaposition. They
could also be overt and achieved through navigation even, or by arrangements of headings, image process,
metaphor.
Network models are rarely translated as overt, though you will find this translation in something like the visual
thesaurus. They are often expressed as a horizontal navigation bar. Rarely if ever do we find network translated
into interface.
An advantage of this systematic approach, quite apart from the fact that the resulting new media design is clearer,
often more creative, and semantically truer, is that it brings gaps to light.
Putting it all together
The first and second translations will have already suggested the need to think of how the web site (or CD/DVD)
looks from a three dimensional view, or in other terms, how screens connect as the user drills down through the
site. How does one screen generate the next? This also needs to be true to the semantic pattern that has emerged
and been expressed through the translations. There are alternatives to the over-used Main heading and row of
navigation buttons!
In other words, some attention needs to be given to how screens are sequenced, and how this sequencing remains
true to the non-linear model. Think of the flat model now as a three-dimensional model. A page will tend to outline
a main concept, then condense that again through your navigation choices to be expanded again at the next levels
down.
Fundamentally, though, think of this in terms of mapping the model (its nodes) to your chosen interface. And
consider which layers of structure are to be left out. Web design does not attempt to include everything. Depending
on strategy and target audience, some levels of structure may be inferred rather than included and made explicit.
But do the links you have chosen remain true to the semantic relations between the nodes that have been expressed
in the first translation? Does the second translation suggest how you might do this? These are the questions to ask.
Hopefully the end result of the entire exercise can be Salesian websites which are a powerful tool for the glory
of God and the salvation of souls.
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