There is a cycle that we tend to repeat daily: we open Instagram to reply to a message. Before doing so, we see a story. Then, another. A reel, a news item, or an ad appears. Then ten minutes pass and we may no longer remember why we picked up the phone in the first place. We don’t even need an alarm to sound or a notification to pop up. There is always something else to see.

The Internet works like this. Many platforms we use every day are built around a flow that practically never ends. When one piece of content ends, another is already waiting. When we stop looking at one thing, the next immediately appears.

In a space where everyone is trying to get a few seconds of our attention, it seems logical to think that communicating better means speaking louder, posting more often, or finding a new way to get someone to pause on your post. But what if we also need to learn to be silent?

A reflection from 2012 that aged too well

In 2012, when TikTok did not yet exist and social networks were quite different, Benedict XVI dedicated World Communications Day to a relationship that remains quite interesting today: that of silence and speech. There is a phrase from that message that sums up much of the idea:

“Where messages and information are abundant, silence becomes essential to discern what is important from what is useless and superficial. Deep reflection helps us to discover the relationship between situations that at first glance seem disconnected from each other, to evaluate and analyze the messages; this makes it possible to share considered and pertinent opinions, giving rise to authentic shared knowledge.”

Fourteen years later, the idea seems even more applicable. We open a social network and go from a recipe to a war, from a joke to a reflection on God, and from there to someone selling us a product. All in a matter of seconds.

Catorce años después, la idea parece incluso más actual. Abrimos una red social y pasamos de una receta a una guerra, de un chiste a una reflexión sobre Dios y de ahí a alguien vendiéndonos algún producto. Todo en cuestión de segundos.

Perhaps the problem is not that we have too much information, but that we have less and less time to decide what is worth listening to.

It’s not all about generating content

In July 2025, during the Jubilee of Digital Missionaries and Catholic Influencers, Leo XIV returned to a similar problem.

In front of hundreds of people who work creating content for the Internet, he said something quite direct: “It’s not simply about generating content, but about creating a meeting between hearts.”

Social media allows us to reach thousands or millions of people and know exactly how many saw a post, how long they stayed, and how many decided to share it. But it’s easy to start confusing those numbers with the goal. Communicating faith can’t just be about filling a feed with religious content.

It can also mean listening to what someone is looking for, what questions arise, or what concerns recur. It can mean not feeling like you have to weigh in on absolutely everything. It can even mean leaving a question open instead of trying to solve it in 30 seconds.