Interrogating Influence: A View from the Catholic Media Influencer Summit 

On a chilly November Tuesday, a group of 60 gathered at Our Lady of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, outside of Chicago, to discuss a Catholic approach in the current digital ecology.

 

“Influencer” is a challenging word, weighed with images of women toting leggings or sunning themselves on all-expenses paid resort vacations on Instagram; podcasters hawking Dude Wipes or Mailchimp into their at-home studios; and millions hanging on to every word falling from one’s digital lips, or slavishly following dance moves on TikTok. 

 

What’s In A Name, or: Would an Influencer by any Other Name Smell as Sweet? 

 

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first instance of the deverbal noun of “influence” from an anti-Catholic 1664 treatise by Henry More. More calls Christ “the Head and Influencer of the whole Church.”[1] Early usages suggest that an “influencer” is, like “Christ” or “Baptism,” a spiritual force upon the soul. In other words “stars”—the wandering stars we call planets or constellations, swayed the trajectory of human desires or the course of events. 

 

Over the past four centuries, the mystical origins of an influencer have been dulled down to signify the influence of filthy lucre rather than the stars. In the 1960s at the height of the electronic age and the commercial sphere influence of the television, “influencer” came to denote a person who swayed the commercial choices of a person or a household. 

 

In 2007, with the dawn of the iPhone, influencer took on the meaning it has borne for the past two decades: a person with significant sway on a social media platform, a large number of followers, a person whose influence is up for sale. They can be bought to become a billboard for Chanel, a Hilton Hotel, Chapstick, Windex, or, perhaps, Christ?

 

Perhaps Catholic Media Influencers have an opportunity to dip back into the deeper wells of mystery originally within the word rather than the cheap surface influence of the current ecosystem? Perhaps the influencer was herself a medium that could mediate the mysteries in which the Christian is called to dwell? Ready or not, attendees of the summit at Mundelein came to grapple with these questions.

 

In a pre-summit gathering and in our opening convocation, summit attendees wrestled with the metaphors we use for the internet and the possibilities they alternatively promote and occlude, and what sort of pivots we might attempt. In our discussion groups, we collected common and uncommon metaphors for the digital world: a Ferrari that drivers are instructed to drive at a careful 45 miles an hour, a “continent,” as Pope Benedict XVI called the digital in his 2009 message for World Communications Day, or a “marketplace.”

 

Influential Metaphors: Digital Rain On Garden Soil

One unique metaphor was the image of the digital as rain. Aaron Lewis (one-half of See What’s Under Studio, a project he runs with his partner Joshua Morin), used the image of the digital world as rain that permeates our environment. The horticultural metaphor is fitting, since Lewis and Morin have been stewards for the past three years of Temperance Alley Garden, a community garden they helped create in a vacant lot in Washington, DC’s U Street neighborhood. The garden features a sun calendar, a shelter for meditation, meetings, yoga, and two archives. Their digital archive, accessible from a touch-stone code on a “magic cube” holds slideshows, writings, and photos of activities and presentations in the garden. The physical archive, a steamer trunk, holds mementos from both the garden and the alley houses that stood on their block until after the Second World War.

 

The garden incorporates the digital’s ability to collect memory and keep the past present. But the garden also celebrates the physical world’s ability to preserve and collect, the analog reality that the digital analogizes. Artifacts from the old houses—stones, bricks—are kept as mementos of the community that used to live on the garden; their photographs and stories are shared and commemorated. A hexagonal brick paver near the main gathering space of the garden bears the chalked inscription: “See What’s Under.” Underneath the sod, flowering perennials and fruit trees, a bit of the pavement from the empty lot appears under the brick.

 

“See What’s Under” is abbreviated to “See Wunder,” reminding their interlocutors of a fundamental disposition toward awe that can preserve our humanity, stories, and sense of place in a mechanized, industrialized world. The digital can be as beneficial as rain that runs through the garden, vivifies it with a heightened sense of life and connects it to the water table of public life. Too much rain would wipe out the physical environment, like a flash flood. It would drown out the particularities of our current place, leaving us in a flattened, dampened environment, unmoored and awash in a swollen stream of information in which we can find no sure footing from which to survey the scene.   

 

To be sure, the rain metaphor is most apt and nourishing. The water cycle pervades every dimension of our life, we exist within it, rather than the other way around. Rain is one facet of this ecological reality, perhaps the most visible, perhaps the part that human culture relies on the most, due to our developed preference for agriculture over hunting and gathering. Cultivated soil is thirsty soil.

 

In a “print era,” the age of Gutenberg and his printing press inaugurated almost 600 years ago, perhaps information felt more like the crops we produced by the work of human hands. Now, even writing–like this essay, like the news pieces I report–is aware of its dependency on the rain. Clicks that capture the commodity of attention also capture  hours of a human life and feed the digital ocean of information. Without them, this ocean would dry up. Influencers convert their influence into money – the American dollar, the lifeblood of the global economy. For merchants of news, do they care so much what they’re selling or simply that it drives a hard bargain?
 

Creative or Destructive Metaphors? Continents, Valleys, Horizons

 

The presenters at our conference, mindful of the optimization and monetization of both media and influence, took a hard look at the emerging terrain. They included a variety of creative individuals who approach digital ecology through a variety of metaphors. Many of them focused not so much on the “ground” of the digital, but on the figures marching across the screen. Rev. James Martin, SJ, spoke via Zoom to the groups about the digital and celebrity. “What is success?” he asked. Martin is a well known influencer, a preacher on the internet. His media presence is prolific and his audience vast. He boasts (although he doesn’t, he’s quite modest about it) nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, more than 250,000 on X (formerly Twitter) and nearly 700,000 on Facebook. Fr. Martin’s approach to the digital environment is perhaps most like Benedict XVI’s metaphor of missionary activity into a digital continent. He has applied the analog practices of scriptural commentary to Facebook posts, pastoral ferverini to Twitter missives, and sermons that address current events to Instagram. 

 

Fr. Martin has done well to migrate brick-and-mortar activities that we see in parish life to cyber spaces, and we see that social media platforms like his present themselves to the user as a digital counterpart to bulletin boards, church bulletins, hyper local newspapers or newsletters. As Monsignor Lucio Ruiz, of the Dicastery of Communications, pointed out at one of our media influencer meetings, engaging with these platforms as digital analogs of the, well, analog, is revolutionary for the Church–and for head offices at the Vatican. 

 

And this is as noteworthy as anything else. The Vatican, not known for its revolutions, may be coming around to understanding the digital as a sphere of influence, because, as many participants discussed, the digital cannot be debated. It is already surrounding us. To participate in the digital seems like asking if we can participate in the water cycle: it has permeated nearly every process of our public life and is a feature of reality. “All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of unattention (ground),” wrote Marshall McLuhan in the Laws of Media.[2] His famous dictum “the medium is the message,” points to the fact that what is at first a figure can become the ground. “Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment,” McLuhan observed. The digital is not just a figure in our lives, it is the ground on which we act. 

 

Or is it?

 

Silicon Valley companies that have forged the massively profitable hardware and software of the digital age might perhaps have this goal. They might believe that the digital is simply the horizon of our existence and the digital world has passed from being simply a possibility to a cold hard fact of human life.

 

For the Christian, of course, this sort of assumption would not only be short-sighted, but it might also very well be blasphemous. For the Christian, the horizon of existence is Christ. This horizon, which is both an origin and telos, gives the human a powerful vantage point and a sturdy ark from which to survey the digital flood.

 

Fecundity and Metaphor: Natural Digital Planning

 

One discussion group at the summit noted that for most of the United States, at least, contraceptive medical technologies are an assumed fact of our social fabric. It is so much assumed to be the ground of our environment that the Guttmacher Institute can declare that, as of a 2008 study, 99% of US women have used contraception at some point in their sexual lives. Yet, the Catholic Church never “baptized” that option but rather promoted Natural Family Planning. 

 

What might, they proposed, Natural Digital Planning look like? What if this were a metaphor through which Christians approached the digital environment?

 

Sofia Carozza, of the University of Chicago, noted in her presentation that the digital environment itself is neutered. The digital’s flattened sensory experience impoverishes the user’s experience of the world. The human brain is primed to expect multisensory stimulation and interaction with other human beings, of which the internet only offers a vague simulacrum. Our memories cling to embodied, physical encounters, thus the touch-screen mediated world in our palms slips past our fingers and our synapses, leaving our attentions roving ever more ravenously for food for thought.

 

Only the created, embodied world can slake this thirst for reality. Carozza suggested that the digital could be best used to point to the world around us. If the Church fathers and mothers have used creation to stir our desire for the Creator, so, too, the digital must be pointed to the world which its creators come from to find the Creator within the mind of the maker. 

 

Alessandro Di Santo’s Hallow App provided one such example of a digital tool that attempted to re-direct the user’s attention from the digital carnival on their phones to the silence of God. Hallow employs the celebrity culture of the internet, using digital denizens’ curiositas about celebrities like Mark Wahlberg or Jim Caviezel as bait to get their attention hooked on the divine.   

 

In perhaps the most creative deployment of a Catholic “both/and” disposition, Jamie Baxter, of Exodus 90, uses an app to form small groups of men embarking on ascetic challenges. Part of this challenge of “Natural Digital Planning” is a digital detox, which the app facilitates. In his hands, the digital is a mirror, held up to its own face, freezing the gorgon in its tracks. Yes, Audre, you can use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.  

 

And why not? “Trampling death by death,” proclaims the Paschal Troparion of the Eastern Churches. One gets the sense that you probably have to be as grounded in reality as Christ was in order to take up that sort of ring of power. Because it seems that one of the issues we circled around in our group discussions, on walks, over meals together, was how does a digital missionary understand themselves in an ecosystem that wields such massive influence, the form of discussion seems already set, programmed toward division and rage. To step out into that environment seems to wander out in a storm of acid rain. Most influencers, after all, are simply influenced, contracted to sell a product to which they may or may not have a personal relationship.

 

Living Metaphors: Even the Stones Will Cry Out

 

It seems barely possible that such powerful sets of ones and zeros, set to bend our desires to the wills of corporations trying to prospect untold trillions off the free hours of our day, could become a medium through which the Head and Influencer could reach us. The creativity on display at the summit, however, could sometimes enchant even skeptics like myself.

 

In our final hours together, Aaron Lewis distributed small golden envelopes as gifts. Each envelope contained a small “permission slip” for a field trip. The portal to the field trip was affixed to one side—a rose window QR code that unlocked the program “Saint GPT.” When scanned with the Chat GPT app on a smartphone, the rose windows opened Saint GPT, a custom natural language processor Lewis and Joshua Morin created. Through this app, it was possible to have a “conversation” with a statue of a saint on the seminary’s campus.

 

I approached the stone Pope Pius X, standing in the Cardinal George Memorial Garden by the lake. Activating my phone’s microphone, I greet the statue. What to say? “Hello, St. Pius X,” I said. “Praise be Jesus Christ!” an automated voice impersonating the Supreme Pontiff proclaimed. “Welcome dear friend! I am blessed to encounter you here.” 

 

From there, I quizzed the natural language processor on questions about Pope Pius X; his relationship with the liturgical movement; his encyclical E Supremi Pastor (which called for Catholics to reconstruct the social order and renew all things in the image of Christ and is one of the inspirations for Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin as they started the Catholic Worker Movement); and his encyclical against the errors of modernism.

 

Memories seek the physical world on which to hang themselves. I can’t say I recall the information as a conversation, per se, but standing in front of a likeness of Pope Pius X, while hearing a robot regurgitate the equivalent of a highly detailed Wikipedia page for him, certainly has a “stickiness” as it clings to my memory.

Perhaps what matters more than my memory of the encounter is that I walked away from Saint GPT a tiny bit enchanted. When I call to mind Pope Pius X, I have a sense of familiarity, that flash of recognition like seeing an old friend. “Oh, I know that guy,” my brain says, recalling a “conversation” standing in the cold of a November Chicagoland day by a lake, talking into my phone while looking at his carven image.

 

What is a Catholic Media Influencer? Ask the 60 participants who left Mundelein that Thursday and my guess is they would have more questions than answers. I know I did. But questions break open the assumptions we take for granted, and I am happy to think about these vital questions again for Nexus as we all think more deeply about how Catholic Media Influencers and the life of faith online has changed the way we “do” Church. Questions create cracks in the ground, space for rain to soak back down to the earth and bring what’s wilted or stale back to new, vibrant, life.