Internet freedom and responsibility

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
February 7, 2013

I have come to believe, each time more strongly, that the more freedom one has, the more responsibility he should also exercise. The two cannot and should not be separated.

Freedom is such a tremendous gift that it gives us power to be anything or anywhere we want to be, including to be in the gutter – or worse, in hell. That’s why, it has to be directed and conformed to a law that is meant to be good for all of us.

That’s not a limitation of freedom. That actually enhances freedom, since that makes freedom to get engaged with its proper purpose. That’s when freedom would truly serve us for our own good and the good of everyone else. And that good is none other than ultimately to love God and others in the truth.

The Internet, especially its very popular social networking services, has opened a wide, new and apparently endless and borderless avenue for us to exercise our freedom of expression. It has brought about a quantum leap of benefits and advantages unknown before.

In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, the digital social networks are creating “a new ‘agora,’ an open public square in which people share ideas, information and opinions, and in which new relationships and forms of community can come into being.”

He went to the extent of saying that the spaces created by this new technology, if properly handled, can make the exchange of information into true communication, the links can ripen into friendship, and connections can facilitate communion.

That’s why, according to the Pope, all those who make use of them must exert great effort to be “authentic since, it is not only ideas and information that are shared, but ultimately our very selves.”

That’s a statement worth meditating on, if only to make into a strong conviction the truth that in any communication, it is not merely ideas that are exchanged, but ultimately a person-to-person interrelationship is taking place.

Great care therefore has to be done. And it should be made clear that in these exchanges, it is not only about who makes sense or more sense that matters, but rather the ultimate goal and requirements of charity have to be reached and met.

We need to examine ourselves more deeply if we are using the Internet and its social network services properly. While it’s true that these technologies can be used to further facilitate our ordinary communications, we also need to make sure that they are not used to foster inanities, vanities, waste of time, obsessions or worse, to commit big sins and crimes.

Nowadays, pornography is a common stuff in this environment. Also phishing and trolling. And all sorts of fraud and forms of indignities are committed.

We definitely need to check ourselves frequently to see if our use of these powerful means is on the right track toward our proper goal, if we truly are facilitating authentic communication, if we are all becoming better persons, understanding and loving each other more, aside from understanding issues more deeply, etc.

The digital world should improve our capacity for tolerance to an ever-increasing range of diversity, but it should also sharpen our love for one another and our understanding and appreciation of opinions as well as absolute truths.

These should be the standard and criteria to assess the quality of our use of these means. We cannot remain cavalier in this regard, because these new technologies, while giving us great good, can also cause big and even almost irreparable damage to us.

We also need to understand that there has to be an effort to use these technologies for the ultimate purpose of communication. And that is evangelization, spreading the Good News about God and ourselves with respect to our ultimate end.

The Pope spells this out quite clearly. “The challenge facing social networks is how to be truly inclusive,” he said. That means these networks should include God and should be open to all.

Otherwise, these powerful means can be likened to the Tower of Babel that was built for the purpose of reaching heaven merely by human effort. God destroyed it and made it to cause such confusion of languages that the people could not understand one another anymore.