I love details: I don’t just want great sweeps of history or grand theory. I like to see how things play out in real life. That’s what drives some of my environmental writing, and the same thing applies to global business and social media. Here’s the dilemma I woke up to this morning, at 4am, a good example of the wonders of global communication and of its hassles. I’ve been put in charge of organizing a panel about China for the Global Information Industry Summit in Berlin in September, and I’m also speaking in Hong Kong next month. I want to talk to a colleague who knows a lot about this, so I emailed him my outline. He’s written back from Moscow saying he can’t Skype but will call me when he gets some time between meetings. But I’ve sent my cellphone away to be unlocked before I leave for China (this will allow me to use local SIM cards, saving a good deal of money, I hope, and having a domestic number for people to use), so I had to root round my daughter’s room to find hers and send the number to Paul in Moscow. This way he can call me at his convenience, even if I’m walking to the Coop for groceries–and that’s because Great Barrington does have fairly good cellphone service now. It was only a couple of years ago that I first saw someone on the street using a mobile.