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Posted: November 2
(Rome) For the last two evenings I have met with Jesuits who have come to the Curia: one group was the assistancy representatives of Jesuit higher education around the world; the other group was a special task force that the social apostolate convened to talk about the issue of globalization. In both cases they wanted to know about the communication apostolate, and I found myself talking about the internet. That happens more and more often, sometimes to the bafflement of older Jesuits whose frame of reference is the communication scene of 20 or even 10 years ago. But the internet is becoming not just one mode of communication but a basic delivery system for most kinds of communication.
Most afternoons I like to wind down by listening to folk music—coming from Boston on radio station WUMB which reaches me in Rome via internet. The quality is amazingly good, better than any radio I have ever owned. WUMB provides a broad mix of contemporary and traditional musicians who play music I love and talk about their art. I cannot listen to it earlier in the day or I would not get anything done. I even find myself being more aware of the weather in Boston than back in hometown of Denver. With "streaming" audio I get the feed continuously, unlike a few years ago when it was necessary to download an entire audio recording before you could listen to it. Now streaming video is gaining in strength, as is evident from an article I read about a test BBC is running to let people download the British network's TV programming free of charge. Apple computers pioneered the iTunes Music Store which is now moving into providing some television shows that iPod users can purchase. The article in the International Herald Tribune noted, however, that "in terms of mainstream TV fare, the current BBC pilot is in front. Taken to an extreme, it could seriously threaten traditional TV broadcasting if it succeeds."
What grabbed my attention were the numbers. According to the IHT, it costs several million pounds to transmit a year's worth of one channel's content over standard earthbound TV. It only costs 700,000 pounds to transmit the same content by satellite transmission. But it costs just 12,000 pounds to send it over the internet.
What this revolution in costs threatens is the choke hold that major networks used to have. With our limited budgets Jesuits could never dream of breaking into or competing with CBS and NBC. Now the internet is opening a huge window of opportunity, provided we have the imagination and daring to jump into the fray, especially when you can prepare the original content digitally with equipment that only requires a fraction of what video and audio production used to demand. And then you begin to think about what is possible educationally, how a school is not necessarily confined to people in its neighborhood or those within communiting distance. No wonder I find myself speaking about internet in a variety of contexts. We all need to be looking at it more seriously and trying to imagine what we could do with it.
One part of my attention as I write this blog is focused on the video capture that is going on, that is transferring video images from my camcorder to my computer so that I can prepare to "broadcast" it over the internet. The footage comes from last week's canonization ceremony of St. Alberto Hurtado, the Chilean Jesuit social activitist who died in 1952. Hurtado was an innovative man who founded the magazine, Mensaje, as well as the Hogar de Cristo program of social service. So he would appreciate my attempts to move forward with technology. So would St. Ignatius who wrote one of the very last of his 7,000 letters to the company who had sold him the first printing press the Jesuits had. Ignatius, the great mystic, was unhappy the number of vowells available for typesetting and did not like the way the italic type fonts looked. He would probably be in my office checking out the compression codecs and see whether the footage would look good to Jesuits and friends who watch it on our web site.
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