:: creating digital relics :: ::

THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Cellphone as Church Chronicle, Creating Digital Relics
By Elisabeth Rosenthal,
International Herald Tribune
[Published: April 8, 2005]

...this week, the heavy air around the pope's bier has not been filled with prayer so much as with tiny popping flashes and clicking shutters...

...The church and cellular telephone technology are arguably the two most important and contrasting institutions here in Rome: one very old, the other very new. For the church, the bigger means the better to impress; for the other, ever-more-tiny wins the crowd...

..."In the past, pilgrims would take away with them a relic, like a piece of cloth on the saint's body," said Gianluca Nicoletti, a media commentator for La Stampa, adding: "Here there's been the transposition to a level of unreality. They're bringing home a digital relic"...

...what seems most remarkable is the way the cellphone camera has became central to religious experience. In a way, this makes sense for a pope who played to the camera, and on a square now lined with television crews...

..."With the cameras of the world focused on it, St. Peter's has become the sancta sanctorum of the digital world," Mr. Nicoletti said. "While they're waiting in line they could be chanting or praying but instead they're taking pictures because they're caught in a parallel event"...

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