Oy -- absent embedded links, which were stripped by this program and will be reintroduced later

*The Eternal Sunshine of Facebook’s FarmVille

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference progresses this week, some 20 million Facebookers will spend hours happily debating what seeds to sow in FarmVille while neglecting to spend even 10 minutes debating ways to slow global warming.

Apparently we care more about whether to plant imaginary strawberries or imaginary potatoes than we do that 300,000 people in Maldives stand to lose the very real land they live on to the effects of climate change. The island is at risk of being submerged due to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

According to a poll conducted for the National Conference of Citizenship (NCoC) in May of this year, when asked how many people expressed opinions about political, social or community issues on social networking sites, the answer was 17%. When asked how many used the Facebook causes application the answer was a scant 7%.

Why so little civic engagement? Why so much interest in taking quizzes to find out which celebrity we resemble or where to find a Christmas sweater for our virtual pet polar bear?

Facebook is a social networking site, primarily. However it is also becoming a site where people spend the bulk of their time online. If our FB friends aren’t talking about an issue, chances are we won’t pay attention to it or, perhaps, even know about it.

That's why it's concerning that there's so little civic engagement there. It's like reading a newspaper entirely researched, written and edited by your friends. But with actual newspapers on the decline, those who aren't already politically invested and engaged are given little incentive to care about the world outside Facebook’s virtual gates.

Sure, there are a lot of news and opinion sites for those interested in reading them -- in fact, thanks to the Web, we can access more news now than ever. It’s also true that there are currently more opportunities to become civically engaged than there were in the past, through online petition drives, and the like.

However, here we are limiting the discussion to opportunities for civic engagement on Facebook as, again, this site is where many people increasingly spend time online.

It’s challenging to bring the worlds of social, occupational and political discourse together -- yet that is what many Facebook users are doing. We are inviting our rabbi to sit down at the table for lunch with our fundamentalist Christian cousin, our gay housemates and our Sarah-Palin-loving boss. What rules do we follow? It's daunting to talk about anything more substantial than bacon on Facebook, since doing so invites nearly instant criticism from a variety of friends, colleagues, family and acquaintances.

Relaxing, right?

Thing is, we don’t need any more encouragement to become fearful silent spectators (or "lurkers" if you will) at the world-table as globally important issues play out before us.

Some would rather not risk losing face by showing face.

Should we capitulate to fears by jumping into the reassuring arms of nothing-ventured-nothing-gained propositions like FarmVille?

Facebook has 350 million users. There’s a lot of potential power in that number -- something CEO Mark Zuckerberg hints at, maybe grandiosely, when he calls Facebook "a movement, not a website." However, a chief objective of people who join social networks is simply to expand their own wealth or power, to establish and promote their individual “brands.” All fine and good, but even better would be Facebook-access to activism-related tools and quizzes for the civic-minded among us as well. Now would be a good time for nonprofits to step forward with their ideas in this regard.

After all, President Obama was elected about a year ago because we wanted "change." Change came all right, but it wasn’t quite what we were hoping for. Change has been suffered. Thing is, we still want positive change, we just don’t quite know how to make it happen.

Those of us who voted for Obama hoped things would be better by now, and in many ways they’re worse. It’s been a tough year, with unemployment rates rising and the worst recession since the Great Depression. But, rather than coming together as a people to continue the work we began when campaigning for Obama, we seem, instead, to be withdrawing into our own chilly quarters. That our social networking efforts are largely devoted to cultivating plots of imaginary earth while our own earth is neglected seems crazy. But that’s exactly what’s happening.

It’s no coincidence that zombies and vampires are popular, especially online. When people feel disempowered in this world they tend to seek superpower in worlds of their own invention. Why wouldn’t we want to enter the everything-is-possible-even-if-you’re-dead-‘cause-you’re-not-really-dead worlds of FarmVille, of zombies and vampires, even of mundane celebrities?

A visit to those worlds is okay. A visit. Because glaciers don’t stop melting when we stop looking. And just because we’re fancy animals doesn’t mean the earth we choose to neglect will choose to sustain us. Generations to come will need oxygen, water, food and shelter. Unless we spend more time talking about how to preserve these things, not much else will matter, because not much else will be around. That the consequences of global warming are almost beyond imagining doesn’t mean they won’t happen. A little escapism is how we cope; a lot of escapism is how we give up.

Melissa J. Price

*What couldn't fit in 800-ish words: a whole fucking lot.