Hacking Catholic social tradition to build a more virtuous internet

September 24, 2024

*From left, the authors of “Virtue in Virtual Spaces” — Walter Scheirer, Megan Levis, and Louisa Conwill*

There’s so much to love and hate about the internet.

At its best, the internet creates and strengthens communities, bringing people together from around the world to learn, work, and laugh with each other. At its worst, the web — and social media in particular — is an alienating wasteland of tirades, abuse, and vulgar content.

A new book by three Notre Dame computer scientists offers a better way forward.

Virtue in Virtual Spaces: Catholic Social Teaching and Technology is the latest title in the Center for Social Concerns’ Enacting Catholic Social Tradition series published by Liturgical Press. The book draws on virtue ethics and the Church’s teaching to demonstrate the potential goodness of technology. In addition, it serves as a practical guide for designing, developing, and using digital technologies in ways that promote human flourishing.

“Pope Francis has said we need to ensure that our forms of communication are guiding us to generous encounters with others, to the honest pursuit of truth, and toward the common good,” said Louisa Conwill, a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering at Notre Dame and one of the book’s three authors. “Like Pope Francis, we see the powerful potential for good in the internet and hope that this project will help bring it about.”

Conwill co-wrote Virtue in Virtual Spaces with Megan Levis, an assistant professor of the practice at the Center for Social Concerns who holds a joint appointment in the College of Engineering, and Walter Scheirer, the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering.

Each book in the Enacting Catholic Social Tradition series explores the systematic application of Catholic social teaching to real-world problems. The books are written for academics as well as pastoral practitioners who want to draw on and learn more about the rich resources of Catholic social tradition for the practical work of justice.

Virtue in Virtual Spaces is an incremental project. Conwill, Levis, and Scheirer laid out a vision in the book. Their next step, which they’re currently working on, involves identifying design principles for software that adhere to the core principles of Catholic social teaching. The final step of the project will be implementation through building generic pieces of software infrastructure that designers and developers can use.

The three authors see their work as “hacking the Catholic social tradition” — in the positive sense.

“Catholic social teaching began in response to the Industrial Revolution. When you think about CST, you should be thinking about technology,” Levis said. “We’re hacking it to apply it to the digital age, taking these principles and applying them in a new context.”

Scheirer added, “People love to complain about the internet. Everybody kind of acknowledges it’s not great, yet we keep going back there. And large companies have basically said this is the way it is, we’re not going to change. But there’s a real opportunity through this project and through the flexibility of technology to do something different.”

Virtue in Virtual Spaces begins with an overview of Catholic social teaching and its history, and then delves into how the main themes of Catholic social teaching might apply to the digital age.

The book proposes a think-build-do framework to evaluate how well a technology aligns with Catholic social teaching. The analysis looks at how the software was conceived (think), how it was implemented (build), and the activities of its users (do). This framework is then applied to case studies of “Catholic Twitter,” Catholic influencers on Instagram, the Buy Nothing Project, and the Hallow prayer app.

Conwill, Levis, and Scheirer have workshopped their framework with software developers and computer scientists to get input on what technology could look like when it embodies Catholic social teaching in real life, not just theoretically.

In general, the design patterns they imagine would promote more intentional conversations among small groups. And bigger forums with large numbers of people should be moderated to some extent.

“We were trying to get away from the Wild West on the internet where everyone is talking and sharing with large groups,” Conwill said. “We found that those types of designs are where you see a lot of the problems with the internet – the fighting, the influencing, unhealthy behaviors, addiction to scrolling.”

Levis said these kinds of design patterns could also be an antidote to the alienation that people feel online.

“One of the themes in our book that is coming through Catholic social teaching is this idea of healthy dialogue,” Levis said. “The earlier internet had things like bulletin board systems where people could connect over shared interests. Our hope is to resurface that style of connecting and forming intentional communities. This is something that is important to being human.”

That’s not to say they want to lose the benefits of wider connections that enable people to gather information or be inspired by new ideas. “I think the challenge now is how can we do that in ways that are still promoting virtue,” Conwill said.

Virtue in Virtual Spaces is the second book in the Enacting Catholic Social Tradition series.

The series began in 2023 with Counting the Cost: Financial Decision-Making, Discipleship, and Christian Living by Clemens Sedmak, a professor of social ethics at Notre Dame and director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and Kelli Reagan Hickey, director of formation at the Francesco Collaborative and a graduate of the Mendoza College of Business master’s in management program. Counting the Cost was recognized with a third-place award in the Catholic Social Teaching category and an honorable mention in the Church Professional category at this year’s Catholic Media Association Awards.

The next book in the series will be Dwelling with Dignity: Catholic Social Teaching and Homelessness by Suzanne Mulligan, a moral theologian and professor of the practice at the Center for Social Concerns whose work engages the application of Catholic social doctrine to housing, gender-based violence, and human trafficking.

Future volumes will cover topics such as community organizing, integral ecology, and peace building.

The Center for Social Concerns will host a book launch for Virtue in Virtual Spaces from 5–7 p.m. on Thursday, September 26, in the Geddes Hall Coffee House. Learn more about the event here.