"...The new technologies have also opened the way for dialogue between people from different countries, cultures and religions. The new digital arena, the so-called cyberspace, allows them to encounter and to know each other’s traditions and values. Such encounters, if they are to be fruitful, require honest and appropriate forms of expression together with attentive and respectful listening. The dialogue must be rooted in a genuine and mutual searching for truth if it is to realize its potential to promote growth in understanding and tolerance..."


People that use new technologies, even if they use them in an autonomous and often solitary manner, in reality find themselves always in contact with others, possibly across the world. This contact happens through computers connected among themselves and sharing the same structure of the “net” that allows users to interact. This is all called “cyberspace”.

Wikipedia defines it as such:
Cyberspace is the global domain of electromagnetics as accessed and exploited through electronic technology and the modulation of electromagnetic energy to achieve a wide range of communication and control system capabilities. It is seen as the immaterial dimension that allows computers across the world to communicate with each otherin a network allowing the users to interact among themselves. The internet in a general sense: the word has its origin in the science fiction work cyberpunk, in which cyberspace includes various types of virtual realities shared by users deeply immersed in such dimensions, or by entities that exist within information systems. Today the term is commonly used to refer to the “world of the internet” in a general sense.

Cyberspace is not simply a collection of computers or a group of people, but rather a true and veritable world, a habitat with its own rules and dynamics, with its places and its inhabitants. A place that comes to be inhabited and not just “used”: something that is not primarily understood as a tool to “make things” but rather an atmosphere in which I live, I feed myself, and I construct my existence in relation to others.

This is why the Pope focuses his attention on the relationship that is established in this place with the others; it is a relationship that is carried out in dialogue, and once it is created, contributes to building the personality and the very existence of the users.
Therefore dialogue demands that it be confronted in an honest and correct manner, in a stile of attentive and respectful listening. It is a dialogue that cannot push itself toward a relativistic outcome, and that asks to be founded on the truth of our faith, open in Christological perspective to the respectful and warm encounter with all people.