Communication Does Not Just Inform. It Forms

Four days into his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV told journalists something that applies well beyond journalism

Four days after his election, before he had settled into most of the ordinary business of the papacy, Pope Leo XIV chose to meet with the journalists who had spent weeks covering the death of his predecessor, the conclave, and his own first days in office. What he told them was not primarily about the news cycle. It was about what communication actually does.

“Communication is not only the transmission of information,” he said, but is also the creation of a culture, of the human and digital spaces where people meet to talk and think together. It was a brief line inside a longer address about peace, truth, and the responsibilities of the press. It deserves more attention than a passing remark, because it names something most people using digital tools every day have never been asked to consider.

The Assumption Worth Questioning

The ordinary way of thinking about communication treats it as a pipe. A fact exists somewhere, and communication is the process of moving that fact from one mind to another with as little distortion as possible. On this view, better communication simply means a clearer pipe: less noise, more accuracy, faster delivery.

This is not wrong, but it is radically incomplete, and the incompleteness matters more now than at any point before. A pipe does not change what flows through it. Communication does. The words available to a culture shape which thoughts are easy to have and which are difficult. The platforms available to a generation shape which relationships are easy to sustain and which quietly wither from disuse. The habits of attention a technology rewards become, over time, the habits of attention a person simply has.

This is what it means to say communication creates culture rather than merely serving it. Every sustained way of communicating produces a way of being together, whether or not anyone designed it to.

What Digital Environments Have Actually Created

Apply this to the last two decades of digital communication and the claim stops being abstract.

Social platforms did not simply give people a faster way to share what they already thought. They created an environment in which visibility rewards intensity, where the calmest and most accurate statement of a position routinely loses attention to its most inflammatory version. That environment did not appear from nowhere. It was created, by design choices about what to reward, and it has in turn created habits of public speech that now feel natural to people who never consciously chose them.

Messaging platforms did not simply make correspondence quicker. They created an expectation of near-immediate response that has reshaped what silence means between people, and reshaped what a reasonable person now considers rude. Search engines did not simply organise information. They created a culture in which the answer that appears first is frequently treated as the answer that is true, regardless of how that ranking was produced.

None of this is an argument against digital communication. It is an argument that every platform, without exception, is already doing the cultural work the Pope named, whether its designers intended it or noticed it happening.

The Tower of Babel, Updated

Pope Leo XIV’s address returned repeatedly to an image from Genesis: a confusion of languages that leaves people unable to understand one another despite standing in the same place. He described the present information environment as its own version of that confusion, a scattering of loveless, often ideological languages that make genuine understanding difficult even between people who technically share a tongue.

This is a sharper diagnosis than the more familiar complaint about misinformation. Misinformation names a problem of false content. The Tower of Babel names a problem of broken relationship, where people are not merely disagreeing about facts but have lost the shared grammar that would let disagreement become dialogue rather than parallel monologues.

Digital platforms did not invent this fracture. But an environment that rewards speed over reflection, and reach over accuracy, will widen a fracture that already existed. And an environment that lets people curate away every voice that unsettles them will make the fracture feel, from the inside, like clarity rather than isolation.

What Responsible Communication Requires

If communication creates culture, the standard for judging it changes. The question is no longer only “is this true,” although that remains necessary. The further question is “what kind of human environment does saying this, in this way, on this platform, help to build.”

The Pope named several concrete commitments for those working in media, and they generalise well beyond professional journalism to anyone posting, forwarding, or replying today. Refuse to pursue agreement through aggression, even when aggression works better in the short term. Reject the logic of competition that treats every exchange as something to be won. Never separate the pursuit of truth from the patience with which truth must be sought, since a fact delivered without patience frequently produces resistance rather than understanding.

There is also a quieter discipline implied in the address: restraint. Not every true thing needs to be said in every place at every moment, and not every provocation deserves a response. A person who has internalised that communication creates culture will sometimes choose silence, not from indifference, but because they can see what a given exchange would build if they engaged with it on its own terms.

A Standard for Institutions, Not Only Individuals

This has direct implications for anyone designing a platform, a newsroom policy, or a parish communication strategy, not only for individuals choosing their words.

A platform that treats engagement as its only measure of success has already made a cultural choice, whether or not anyone at the company would describe it that way. It has decided that a culture of intensity is an acceptable byproduct of growth. An institution that designs its digital presence around the same instinct, treating shares and reactions as the measure of a message’s worth, will find itself gradually shaped by the same incentives, regardless of how good its intentions were at the outset.

The alternative is not to abandon digital communication, which the Pope did not counsel and which would not be realistic in any case. It is to ask, before publishing anything, what human environment this contributes to, and to hold that question with the same seriousness usually reserved for whether the content is accurate.

Technology develops faster than the reflection needed to guide it well, the Pope observed, which is precisely why this mission grows more urgent rather than less as the tools become more powerful. Communication was always going to shape culture. The only question that has changed is how much faster it now does so, and how much less room there is to notice before the shape has already set.