Forums for Dialogue: Teleconferencing and the U.S. Catholic Church
By Frances Forde Plude
[This is Chapter 14 in the book Media Culture and Catholicism, edited by Paul Soukup, Sheed and Ward, 1996.]
An essential component of human organization, from religious communities to constitutional democracies, public opinion depends on public expression and public assembly. Today we speak and assemble in ways unknown to past generations of theologians, political leaders, and social theorists. Our forums have changed: Some have disappeared: others have arisen. Our Town Hall debates and even our faith communities have given way to TV and radio talk shows, world-wide news analysis, satellite and telephone hookups, and the internet.
I offer the ideas proposed here – about the value of forums for dialogue – with the hope that new, interactive, technological modes of speech and assembly will enrich public discourse. Such forums, I believe, increase in importance as churches, nations, and communities of all kinds, attempt to move beyond serious divisions toward collaborative solutions. We have seen, in Bosnia and elsewhere, the cost of such division.
Here I examine one specific kind of technological forum, the teleconference, reflecting on its history and its future potential as a mode of “assembly” within churches. These concepts have new meaning as use of the internet and the World Wide Web explodes.
For more than a decade we heard predictions of an imminent burst of growth in the teleconference but it didn’t happen. Despite this track record, I begin here with a prediction that the boom has begun and is fueled by the ease of computer conferencing. I will treat three aspects of teleconferencing: (1) its current status, along with examples; (2) the special fit of conferencing with church goals and needs; and (3) the deeper contextual issues raised by such dialogue.
Essentials of the Technological Forum
The three main types of technical conferences differ according to their links: computer links, audio links, and audiovisual links, i.e., videoconferencing. Each one constitutes a forum – a technical bridge by satellite or telephone lines – that enables people in different places to “be” together. Teleconferences are meetings. Although people tend to think of videoconferences as TV programs, they are essentially meetings. The key factor differentiating teleconferencing from television is its interactive nature: People can talk back.
In computer conferencing people interact with others through their computers. Some of the time this occurs not in “real” time but in a delayed manner. In other words, people can sign on to the conference whenever they like, retrieve existing messages or text, and then leave a response for the other conference participants to pick up at their convenience. Most electronic mail (email) works like this. Of course, one can also join ongoing conversations.
Audio conferences bridge or connect people from varied sites so they can talk together. Such meetings have a feel about them that “the meter is ticking” so organizers plan them well ahead of time, with materials distributed in advance. This format requires a certain amount of courtesy and verbal name tags throughout the meeting so people can identify the person speaking; this helps because one has only audio cues to sort out individual input.
In both conferences, interaction obviously occurs. When we turn to videoconferences, we will similarly assume a forum with feedback. (A conference is not really a conference without interaction.) Conferences differ. Some satellite-connected video programs hook various sites together simply for information distribution, such as a corporate show to unveil a new product. Here I speak primarily of video meetings with two-way interaction. Earlier feedback usually took place from the field via telephone calls because of the expense of two-way video. However, one can now predict the long-expected growth in videoconferencing because prices have dropped dramatically due to technological breakthroughs. A recent invention allows people at computers to be seen at other sites, using a small video camera on the computer.
In the past all three conferencing modes utilized analog (electromagnetic wave form) message transmission but now digital (computer bit pattern) transmission has replaced much of it. Once this change occurred it became possible to speed up the transmissions through time-sharing, compression, and other techniques. A concomitant technological change, the switch from copper wires to optical fibers, allowed “space” for more messages. Information traveling over fiber highways and satellites help make global distances irrelevant.
Since the demand exists for so much information transfer, developed nations are racing to construct the global interconnected networks to carry the data load. The European Union (EU) nations early made this a key priority and predicted 12% of the gross national product of the EU would be in this telecom sector. Similarly, the U.S. Congress proposed the development of an information highway to update America’s infrastructure. Even without government help, telephone and cable companies were major players in this growth. And in an unregulated market, major corporate and institutional groups built their own local area networks (LANs), providing even more highways for messages.
Videoconferences became more economical because of several specific changes:
Signals now use public-switched telephone networks instead of dedicated lines.
Technical standardization emerged as public and private networks and various long-distance carriers developed compatibilities for easier interface.
Engineers improved the technology of compression so video no longer needed as much transmission space (bandwidth).
The manufacture of desktop video communication systems simplified interaction which had required large TV studio settings in the past.
The development of new video processor chips meant cost savings and allowed the insertion of computer graphics into video conferencing.
Soon mobile (or desktop) videoconferencing units were wheeled from room to room, making video forums possible – an easy technical “freedom of assembly” at much less cost. Now we can examine teleconferencing and church goals and needs.
Pioneers in Catholic Church Teleconferencing
Much creative conferencing already occurs within the U.S. Catholic Church. Historically, the San Francisco Archdiocese pioneered teleconferencing techniques for the entire nation, using a NASA satellite in their early experiments. For this overview, though, I have selected three types of current teleconferences as examples: one forming a university-family community (Notre Dame); one that linked a prayerful community (Contemplative Outreach); and one used to build a pastoral community (the National Pastoral Life Center). All three types utilized the facilities of the Catholic Telecommunications Network of America (CTNA). For years this satellite network provided the infrastructure for helpful forums within the American Catholic community.
When its planners first conceptualized CTNA, they saw it as a significant intra-institutional communications system; the satellite system could facilitate internal communications through lower-cost telephone transmission, fax transmission, and intra-messaging of all kinds – internal meetings/briefings and training conferences, for example.
Several decades ago, having recently completed doctoral studies at Harvard and MIT, I accepted a consultancy to travel to many Catholic universities throughout America and confer with them about how a satellite system could service their needs. Monsignor Michael J. Dempsey, a telecommunications pioneer, coordinated this research phase for CTNA. I remember arriving in South Bend to suggest that Notre Dame might find it helpful to interconnect with their Alumni Clubs through CTNA satellite facilities. I suggested to then President, Father Ted Hesburgh, that he could speak to Notre Dame graduates throughout America with a satellite hookup.
And Notre Dame had the vision to do this. When Father Hesburgh retired as President of Notre Dame he gave a farewell address to graduates throughout America on a satellite teleconference. Dr. Kathleen M. Sullivan, Director of Alumni Continuing Education at the university, told me that with 200 Alumni Clubs in this country, they have a university community just waiting to be linked.
After consulting their alumni, Notre Dame decided to focus their teleconferences on family life – a continuing challenge to their graduates and to the nation-at-large. One live-interactive teleconference, for example, helped parents (and grandparents!) understand preschooler needs. A panel of experts from Notre Dame and St. Mary’s College offered ideas and answered questions.
One of the most significant decisions made by (the university was to link up with diocesan family life offices throughout the country in the teleconference planning and marketing. Notre Dame also distributed special guidebooks for local facilitators and provided information packets for all participants. The packets contained promotional ideas and a list of locales participating – materials well planned to aid local networking.
For example, a teleconference on elementary education had links to Catholic school personnel; using area zip codes tags, the Catholic school principals in every locale with an alumni club received notification of the broadcast. This local networking on the ground is vital to interactive televised meetings.
Part of the on-going celebration of Notre Dame’s Sesquicentennial year involved a satellite teleconference. Alumni clubs were urged to participate in community service outreach in their areas – giving back to society what the university gave to them. The celebratory satellite teleconference highlighted some of the local community service projects and allowed a forum for the university to share its history and its future mission.
I don’t believe any other university in America has developed the systematic educational outreach to its alumni that Notre Dame has. The fact that a significant part of this community-building and service occurs through teleconference forums provides a rich model of dialogic enrichment for churches and other institutions in America.
The support offered to modern contemplatives by satellite interconnection exemplifies another valuable forum. Trappist monk Thomas Keating founded Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. as a national service organization to facilitate the growth of centering prayer. The many works of Basil Pennington, a member of the same religious order, have popularized this contemplative approach to prayer. Hundreds of prayer groups meet regularly throughout the country and many participants attend centering prayer retreats or conduct workshops in how to pray the contemplative way.
Contemplative Outreach linked these scattered groups through a teleconference with two goals: (1) to facilitate a sense of national support among the communities, and (2) to permit various local groups to hear a talk by Abbot Keating and enter into a dialogue with him. Most locales either began or concluded the satellite meeting with a 20-minute period of centering prayer – thus providing a technologically-linked prayer group throughout the country. The organization conducted an extensive evaluation process, with participants giving reactions; these suggestions were distributed widely so the organizers could make improvements in subsequent televised meetings. This studied evaluative procedure is a significant aspect of successful teleconferences.
In addition to interactive prayer gatherings, other pastoral practice benefits from special interactive training in televised meetings. One expert in this field was Father Phil Murnion, Director of the National Pastoral Life Center in New York City. When I asked him whether this forum represents a participatory church he said: “Absolutely! When I was first asked to do TV programs, I said no because that is not what we do. But when I was told it would be a forum, with dialogue, a meeting-on-the-air, then I said sure, we will do that.”
These teleconferences focused on a range of topics: the drug crisis; the Church as seen through media; teaching sexual morality; what’s really working in adult religious education; churches and rural communities; dwindling priest numbers and church finances; and many other topics. Some people may say it panders to the trendy. However, Murnion senses from his feedback in the field that the topics were “timely.”
Assembling a live audience in many locales represents a major challenge for many meetings. Father Murnion and his staff distribute press releases and fliers to local affiliates and specific constituencies for each teleconference topic. The sessions were videotaped and many requested taped copies; for example, the teleconference discussion on the parish council was frequently requested. The number of telephone calls received by the teleconference can sometimes act as a barometer of how many people are out there. Sometimes no calls come in.
The fact that many folks prefer to view programs later (on tape) indicates that we still tend to think of these conferences as video programs instead of meetings. Teleconferencing best occurs as an extension of the telephone, however, rather than a form of television show; it is a dialogic forum.
Churches in the Modern Telecommunications World
During the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church recycled its view of interaction with the world. In the Church in the Modern World document we see the recognition of the value of dialogue with the world, while retaining the obligation to critique it in terms of higher, gospel, values.
If the theology of Church now endorses dialogue (with other churches, with laity, with women, with modern society), then systematic forums to facilitate this dialogue will aid the work of the Spirit in a postmodern world. We use automobiles in this work; we use modern medical science in this work; we can also use communication technologies in this same work. One of the first things required is that we stop thinking of all media as programs. Many media are simply tools, connecting links – just like letters, like telephone calls, like mediated meetings.
Many factors should insure a comfortable fit between teleconferencing and churches. In fact, an institutional infrastructure in the U.S. Catholic Church already exists in its system of schools, diocesan structures, parish communities – all awaiting the linkages or networking that communication systems provide.
The U.S. Catholic Church first developed a communications network in connection with its system of schools. The Catholic Television Network consists of more than a dozen dioceses with closed circuit microwave broadcast systems to service their schools. This network still exists, and many affiliates now lease some channel space to mobile telephone firms, thus earning income to support their work. Many of these dioceses have celebrated more than 20 years of service by their closed-circuit systems. In San Francisco, for example, the earliest satellite teleconferencing experiments began, under the direction of the man who is later became Bishop of the San Jose (Silicon Valley) diocese: Bishop Pierre DuMaine.
In their educational television studios located in St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, a user-controlled teleconference studio was constructed before 1980. Marika Rumet, the creative woman who directed that studio operation, later convinced the heads of the Hewlett Packard Corporation to develop one of the corporate world’s most innovative satellite teleconferencing operations.
Another early staff member in this teleconferencing history was a Sister of Notre Dame, Jeanette Braun. Jeanette later organized many international teleconferences for corporate clients. She served a staff role in an historic early satellite project in San Francisco called “Project Interchange.” This teleconference permitted teachers in public and private schools in northern and southern California to “meet” regularly to discuss their individualized instruction curricular work. The project utilized the Canadian/American Communications Technology Satellite (CTS), under the direction of NASA engineers.
Almost thirty years ago, Bishop Pierre DuMaine wrote in an unpublished document entitled “Notes on an Electronic Information/Communications System to Support Individualized Instruction”:
The “economy” of computer-supported information systems depends, of course, upon a sufficiently large number of users to optimize the capacity of the computer and to achieve economy of scale necessary…This is possible if remote users can be linked to the information source by telephone line, cable, or communications system (1972, p 1).
Conceptual Communications Issues
As I struggle to delineate the larger contextual issues emerging in a tele-connected Church (and world), many, many things come to mind. In these remaining paragraphs I can only point readers and practitioners toward some of the basic questions and hint at ways to seek answers to these questions. I will reflect here on (a) broad context questions, (b) selected concepts in relation to church, and (c) emerging needs.
As background, we should reflect upon certain facts. For one thing, we regularly see, even hear, teleconferencing in our evening news. Satellite linkages regularly interconnect various geographic sites into a program like the evening network news or Ted Koppel’s Nightline. So, in a sense, our news/analysis TV programs are already forums. The Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS developed into one of the most substantive and in-depth news forums in America. This is a model for the dialogic approach to problem-solving; sometimes it works better than others.
Another background factor for our reflection is that infrastructures in America (the information superhighway) require planning and development if we are to keep pace with telecommunications growth globally. Networks provide the infrastructure supplied by roads, railroads, and canals of previous eras. Moreover, the news media document almost daily that internet use is spreading to citizens everywhere; it is no longer just for researchers.
Broad Context Questions
We have already become aware that interactive communications technologies have altered the process of decision-making. In Computer Message Systems, Jacques Vallee states, “In conferencing, the messages themselves are not as important as the group process which they support” (1984, p 70). Vallee adds that interactive message systems have many benefits in strategic planning, in group dynamics for better tactical decisions, and in the faster resolution of routine issues. We have consultants like Peter Drucker warning us that the intra-group interactive tools will drive structural changes within organizations. Major effects include decentralization and a flattening of hierarchical structures, with fewer mid-management staff.
In an essay entitled “The Churchification of Christianity,” German theologian Hermann Pottmeyer examines the Church in the light of modern societal change and reflects on the “structural differentiation” of society identified by the theorist Talcott Parsons.
(This) consists of the disintegration of the old multifunctional forms of life in(to) “social partial systems” which then take on functional specialization and tend toward autonomy. Examples of such partial systems are the economy, transportation systems, politics, the state, the nuclear family, and the Church. (1990)
I would add the partial system of telecommunications to this list. Pottmeyer cites the difficulty:
The tendency of these partial systems toward autonomy creates many problems. Since each individual is seen only as a participant in the operation of those partial systems, it becomes more difficult for the individual to find his own identity...The connecting horizon of a consensus of values that links all members of the society continues to disappear. (1990)
This sociological phenomenon contributes to our discord; it calls for new modes of linking and overlapping partial systems if we are to dialogue and collaborate effectively on today’s (and tomorrow’s) challenging issues. Interactive dialogue will help us meet such challenges if we thoughtfully create the forums in our strategic planning and include telecom-infrastructure strategies and use.
Two final broad dynamics: technologies are converging while communities are dispersing. Communication and computer technologies have become so integrated that one cannot see boundaries any longer. Telephones, including mobile phones, are computers; and these computers communicate with each other. However, as these technologies integrate, communal groups disintegrate. Individuals seek hookups with each other through phones, computers, electronic churches. and want ad personals. We must conceptualize and implement new types of forums for a postmodern world where traditional borders have disappeared.
Selected Concepts in Relation to Churches
Churches have an interest in communal groups. Christian churches are supposed to be communities of faith linked to one other. Today we see examples of walls coming down throughout the world – between nations, occasionally between religious groups, sometimes among ethnic enclaves. Dialogic tools and forums can facilitate these unions if we learn how to use them; they require new kinds of interactive communication habits with a lot of listening to one another. When we are used to thinking that we have the right answers, it requires communication re-learning to listen more and to work through legitimate differences.
Churches, along with the rest of society, face enormous training and re-training needs. According to Via Satellite magazine (November 1991, p 32), business teleconferencing to reach and train members became a $195 million business by 1990. The training task is a major focus of teleconferencing in American corporations. The American Catholic Church already uses teleconferencing for training, but needs to plan and coordinate much, much more in this area. Part of the goal, ultimately, is to provide means for people to have on-demand access to the information they need to develop as individuals.
The question of access is another major church-related issue. As communication/information technologies become the coin of commerce in the decades ahead, those who do not have access to the tools and the content (software) will find themselves closed out. Access has clearly become a justice policy issue for today’s churches. One training question – learning to use modern communication technologies – connects to the access question. This involves encouraging local initiative, creating incentives, and fostering other human development strategies.
Distribution of resources will also continue to play a vital role in modern society. As emergency-aid needs arise throughout the world, people see that systems of distribution often hold the key to getting help through to the right people quickly. Communication systems will help to meet this need more and more. And within institutional churches, the allocation of resources (people, funds, etc.) will continue to be a challenge. We need to become expert in using technologies to achieve economies.
For the Catholic Church, the focus for most families remains the local parish community. Our infrastructures should serve and support this local community, not dislodge it. One of the most interesting new communication tools in this arena – the parish video library (PVL) – was the beneficiary of research by the Center for Pastoral Initiatives at the University of Dayton. The Center also studies models of collaborative planning among church organizations, so such collaborative models can be duplicated elsewhere.
Emerging Needs
No one doubts that modern telecommunications present challenges for churches. We have long realized the need for media literacy. We know, without being told by experts, that our communication habits are changing us. Similarly, we are learning more about the impact of mass media. We are now aware that people identify with the stories they see on TV – fictional stories, news stories, and human interest (witness) stories, as well as advertising stories. This bonding with oral and visual narrative creates a whole new hearth for humanity to gather around and to evaluate.
Now we need to focus more on the intra-group communication mechanisms and the role of telecommunications tools in these interactive forums. We need a long-term and systematic strategy so we can move forward with confidence. I propose a two-lane highway approach.
On the one hand we need to bring theologians and communication scholars together for continual “think-tank” interaction – doing the communication research and development work for the Church. Existing professional organizations should have structures (special sections) to accommodate this thinking-together at their organizational conventions. The Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) does this annually in a forum on communication theology. The national offices in Washington (for schools, the bishops’ conference) should all facilitate such forums. Many, many conferences need to be scheduled over the decade, so these thinkers can spend time together for several days or a week – sharing ideas, stimulating the development of new conceptual models. Universities should link their theology and communication faculty in systematic planning forums.
Alongside of this work, however, in the second lane, should be much, much collaborative strategic planning among practitioners, the communication personnel in the trenches, who meet the daily, continual challenges (and crises) where church and society interface and “reach out and touch” each other. This on-going practical planning needs to utilize teleconferencing and other tools to get the day-by-day jobs done. There needs to be much interconnection and collaboration. And both groups – the think tank types and the daily practitioners – need to sustain and enrich each other as the decades progress.
It is right there on the horizon. Karl Rahner called it our “global epoch.”