The other day my professional collaborator, personal friend and communication-technology frenemy Shel Holtz blogged about a presenter at a communication conference who felt dizzy and sat down.

Instead of leaping up and calling 911 or dialing the hotel house phone, one attendee Tweeted the emergency, apparently hoping Seth Godin would know what the fuck to do.

A similarly Twitter-obsessed conference staffer saw the Tweet and ran down the hall and cleared the room. As it turned out, the presenter was suffering from travel exhaustion.

"Another unintended positive consequence of Twitter, wouldn’t you say?" Shel concluded.

No, another life endangered by some modern-day Walter Mitty's obsession with Twitter, I'd say.

The other reluctance we should all have about Twitter, even as we grudgingly accept its occasional social utility, is the Kurt Vonnegut Rule of Farting Around. "Electronic communities build nothing," my favorite humanist wrote near the end of his life. "You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you different." *

Now, Shel will argue till he's blue in the Facebook about all the world's wonders online communities have built. They build connections, of course. They unleash social potential. They help existing communities connect with other existing communities. They helped get Obama elected!

But communities themselves are built by common, shared myths, which are just symbolic and meaningful stories. And good stories require tactile human experience, things we can all relate to physically—hard falls, soggy shoes, dry mouths and tired arms. We'll recieve no Moby Dicks from Second Life, and in the six years since the popular advent of blogs, how many good books have been made from collections of blog posts?

Here's a test: Spend one day surfing the Internet and spend another roaming your neighborhood. See how many good dinner table stories you have after each. There won't be a contest.

"I’ve heard of people using Twitter to get help from people nearby," is a yarn Shel tells in his post about the Twittering numb nuts who saved the conference speaker who was fine to begin with. "Guy
Kawasaki needed a power cable for his laptop while staying (if memory
serves) at the Hotel del Coronado. A nearby resident read the tweet and
offered to drop by with a spare on his way to work."

As Hugh Grant would say, "Not exactly a classic anecdote, is it?"

* Vonnegut also said: "Do you know what a twerp is? When I was in Shortridge High School in Indianapolis 65 years ago, a twerp was a guy who stuck a set of false teeth up his butt and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs." And what do you have to say to that, Shel Holtz?

So this big rusty hulk has been parked around the corner from where I live for years. It always cracks me up because it's always parked in front of the tidiest little condo building I've ever seen, and I can imagine the neighbors cursing.

Of course, I appreciate this rig, being a four-wheel-drive kind of guy myself.

So one afternoon a couple of years ago, this guy and I happened to be at the local Marathon, pumping good gas after bad. I gave him a little nod and a grin. His contemptuous return stare said, "As if."

Blogger Damian Saunders posted a detailed and apparently deeply resonant critique of a recent across-the-board pay cut at Hewlett-Packard, calling it "an unfair act of economic opportunism and greed."

CEO Mark Hurd and his management team are singled out for what Saunders pretty clearly demonstrates is a painless 20% sacrifice to their base salaries that barely touches their massive total compensation. (Hurd earned more than $42 million last year.)

Meanwhile, for Joe Employee, a 5% cut in salary is a 5% cut in total compensation.

And all this because the company made a profit of only $1.9 billion in the first quarter, down some 13% from the same quarter last year.

Weeks after it went up, the post is still "spreading like wildfire from employee-to-employee throughout HP," according to a middle manager at HP who has asked that I withhold her identity.

The 349-and-counting responses, many of them from employees of HP and its acquired partner EDS, universally laud Saunders for his reporting and analysis, many of them using it as a springboard to thoughtfully and convincingly expand on Saunders' criticism. In total, the post amounts to a wikipedic collection of everything that's wrong with HP—and everything that's ever been wrong with HP.

Here's what it's meant to my source:

How has the company responded? Publicly, not at all as far as I can tell. A colleague of mine has a query in with HP's public relations people and I'll update this if we hear back.

As for a response to the employees who are still gobbling this up and spreading it around the organization, my source hasn't seen one: "At this point, I'm not sure what the company could respond with that would resonate with employees."

Saunders predicts employee revolt with a run-on sentence:

"People power has toppled Governments, a
disgruntled employee base has the potential to bring HP to it’s (sic) knees
in days, surely that time bomb’s ticking."

But listening to my source, I'm not sure anyone has the energy to mutiny; she describes the mood as "pretty gloomy."

Seems to me this kind of dynamic could play itself out at lots of organizations over the coming months, at a certain cost to short-term productivity and the long-term health of the institution once the economy does rebound.

Communicators ought to think now—not, as may be the case at HP, when it's too late—about to stand on ground that has shifted, beneath management, beneath employees and beneath the philosophical and economic foundation of every organization.

What should organizations be doing this quarter to avoid an unanswerable, morale-busting blog item like this next quarter?