#BAD09 Today is Blog Action Day 2009 and bloggers are uniting to discuss what could be called the most important issue facing all of humanity – Global Climate Change. Social media has been used to discuss corporate interests, small business and local concerns and even trivial daily minutia. Even though bloggers feel free to discuss almost any topic any time, they typically look at just a few issues related to their business specialty or sometimes narrow personal interests.
The fact that the conversations are so scattered and diverse is what makes it possible to find almost anything online. But BlogActionDay.org has helped to focus the conversation on this single day so that the buzz tends to coalesce around one important issue every year.
This ability to focus on specific issues is what makes social media so powerful and, I hope, useful. The ability to bring attention to your friends and their friends and their friends until we’ve crossed the small six degrees of separation to have a conversation among millions.
I hope that you’ll post to your twitter account, your blog, your FaceBook account and email friends who don’t use those services and just start the conversation about Global Climate Change so that we all start to think about what each one of us can do and what part we can play to address the big issues, like climate change, outside our small circle of friends and colleagues.
Even though it has been incredibly annoying at times, I’ve tried my best to participate fully in recycling. My employer just re-emphasized recycling this week by posting signs nudging everyone who might otherwise drop cans and bottles in the trash to take a few steps further and drop those items in the recycling bin across the room. It’s meaningful when all of us do even these small things.
The smallest thing is to think about it, then escalate to talking about it, then consider doing something, even something small, toward a solution.