I’ve been a member of the seminal online community, the WELL, for around two decades. I’ve been active on Facebook since it opened to non-students. Originally Facebook wasn’t conversational. Other former WELL members and I discussed how Facebook Groups didn’t seem to take off as conversational environments in quite the same way as the WELL’s conferences, many of which are still vibrant after 25 years. Facebook has changed since we had those discussions – now Wall posts and comments on Facebook are like topics and responses on the WELL. (We saw the same pattern in blogs with comments: someone posts a lead item, what we called the “zero post” on the WELL – a conversation starter. In blogs the emphasis was originally on publishing, then some blogs became more conversational, and posts followed by comments on those blogs were very much like topics within conferences on the WELL.)

One difference is that the WELL had a taxonomy: it was called a conferencing system, and was organized as conferences on subjects like Health, Media, Grateful Dead, Virtual Communities, Art, History, Design, etc. Topics were pretty free-ranging within the major subjects, but you knew where you would go to discuss a particular subject. On Facebook, there’s no organizing my subject. All kinds of conversations appear in Facebook’s news feed or activity stream – right now I see conversations about climate change and volcanoes, events, Texas politics, design, business, etc. – not organized in any particular way. A stream of comments some of which become conversations, many casual, some more active and compelling. This really seems to work, and the converations lately are not dissimilar from those I see on the WELL, despite structural differences between the WELL and Facebook.

I find myself drifting more and more into Facebook because there are real, sustained conversations there, unlike Twitter’s more drive-by posting – and because I don’t have to fiddle with a 140 character limit. Twitter feels very broadcast, compared to Facebook (or Wave, or other conversational systems). Not to diminish its importance – Twitter is a great place to share short bursts of information and links. But it’s less “social.”

This is me thinking aloud. Is there a business conclusion from all this?

I’ll close with this thought: I spoke to a group of Realtors last week, and told them not to expect miracles from social media. You’re not using social media because it’s somehow going to bring you more business than traditional media. You’re using it because it’s taking mindshare from traditional media. The audience is there – on the plus side, you can target more specifically the people who might be your customers or clients; on the minus side, they’re scattered over multiple platforms, you have to connect more directly than before, and they don’t often answer the door when salesmen come.

Fen Montaigne has written a piece about penguins and climate change for the New Yorker. The magazine’s web site features a disturbing slide show about how the penguins are threatened by habitat change due to warming sufficient to melt arctic ice. Montaigne suggests habitat change will likely be global, affecting humans as well as penguins.

I’ve been thinking how politicization of climate change is making it hard to think about the problem, which is clearly real, and decide what action we should be taking.

My friend Emily Gertz was in Copenhagen; she’s reporting on it in a discussion at the WELL.

I should say more about the “Collapse” preview I just posted – don’t want to mislead. For every pile of ashes there’s a great squawking phoenix, after all.

In fact I can’t say that we’re not screwed – god knows what unforeseen dangers are lurking in our little corner of the universe. The sun could explode, or the planet could implode. The Yellowstone caldera is overdue for a cataclysmic eruption. All hell could break lose.

And if you’re conversant with Buddhist thinking, you know that all things are impermanent.

That said, I also know that we’re remarkably resilient and we can probably survive more than we know. The real question (as in the global warming controversies) is this: is there something we can do now to avert a catastrophe, and should we be doing it? Those who once denied “global warming” (I prefer climate change), faced with incontrovertible evidence that Something Is Up, are now acknowledging that point but arguing that there’s nothing we can do about it (i.e., we shouldn’t do anything to disturb tourism on Amity Island, even as Bruce the shark cruises the waters, looking for hors d’oeuvres.)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Joel Makower considers four studies that explore the impact on business of climate change and related issues – the need for water management, and uncertainty about energy sources. Says Joel, “our world these days seems to be a succession of forks in the road, points at which decisions need to be made about which pathway we collectively must take.” This reminds me of something Rod Bell used to say, repeatedly: “To solve big problems, you have to go through big confusion.” [Link]

If you’re tired of worrying about climate change or the economy, you can start worrying about water pollution: an article in the New York Times says raw sewage is leaking into waterways. I know that I take water for granted, and I suspect you do, too. There’s always been plenty, and it’s been so cheap we think of it as free. For most of my life, we drank water from the tap without giving it a thought. Lately we’re more comfortable buying the tap water in plastic bottles, thinking somehow that packaged water we pay more for must be safer/healthier.

I don’t really know where my water comes from, and how vulnerable that mystery supply is to toxic pollution. An eye-opener from the Times:
As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater. That has contributed to sewage backups into more than 400,000 basements and spills into thousands of streets, according to data collected by state and federal officials. Sometimes, waste has overflowed just upstream from drinking water intake points or near public beaches.

There is no national record-keeping of how many illnesses are caused by sewage spills. But academic research suggests that as many as 20 million people each year become ill from drinking water containing bacteria and other pathogens that are often spread by untreated waste.

I’m guest blogging at Change.org’s “Stop Global Warming” blog this week. Check out my posts “Bandwidth for Climate Change” and “Politics of Green Innovation.”