Interaktywna telewizja wyzwaniem dla współczesnego duszpasterstwa

Abstract

Interactivity is becoming one of the basic attributes of the contemporary multimedia epoch. The multimedia – a term, which in the 1970s was used with regard to a range of didactic aids, including various materials (illustrations, slides, cassettes and video tapes), has been associated since the beginning of the 90s with PC computers equipped with the function of processing picture and sound. Nowadays the multimedia system is understood as any telecomputing system capable of processing, storing and distributing data in the form of sound, moving pictures, photographs, computer graphics and texts. An important feature of thus understood multimedia techniques is a possibility of the user's interaction with the system. The invention in the multimedia field that can change the traditional perception of the multimedia communication is the television integrated with the computer – a kind of technical hybrid enabling the user to make the full use of multimedia net contents. Multimedia interactive television testifies to a considerable progress in communication processes with the aid of technical means, but at the same time it is the source of ethical problems and an unquestionable challenge for the Church, which is more and more willing to mark its presence in the world of mass media. New media – Internet, digital and satellite television and ITV in the future, are becoming part of modem culture, the implications of which have not yet been fully understood. Therefore the Church should actively get involved in the multimedia education so as to in the space between a “chance and endangerment” – minimalise the endangerment. The point is, especially for the young recipients to learn how – while getting to know the mechanisms of new technologies in social communication – to function properly in the world of cyberspace, according to sound moral criteria as regards the contents they find there and to use the new technology for their own integral development and for the benefit of others. Acquiring defensive mechanisms may soon turn out to be indispensable with the coming of more and more perfect transmission techniques and more and more brutal methods of attracting the viewer's attention. In present-day television the viewer is more and more often treated in a depersonalised way, as a product on sale. It can be anticipated from the commercials announcing the “end of the well-behaved” television in Poland and the introduction of extreme programmes boasting record number of viewers, in which pain, abhorrence and cruelty are becoming a factor of a struggle to win the viewer.