The times are not just a-changin’, they’re a-revolutionizin’! As social media becomes increasingly present in our everyday lives, a major democratic cultural shift is underway. Through the power of relationships, sharing of experiences, and organizing online, previously marginalized voices are pouring into and shaping public conversations like never before.

But serious change will not happen on its own. Despite the increasing presence of a diversity of voices and faces, the Internet isn’t fulfilling its disruptive potential; more often than not, it’s simply replicating and amplifying inequality and segregation. The good news? The fundamental building block common to every social movement is the power of the narrative. Your story… and your willingness to share others’ stories with your networks… can mean the difference between progressive change and perpetuating the status quo. We need you here, building and mapping your relationships, sharing your experience and creating pipelines of empathy and trust that will change the world.

This book is a blueprint for understanding why and how this medium of exchange works, and how our personal stories and daily experiences comprise a profoundly political picture that leads to social action and social change. Through a fun and accessible exploration of the intersection of philosophy, psychology, sociology and technology, it looks at how an historical convergence of forces has constructed a platform of immense possibility. Finally, the book offers concrete strategies and advice for both individuals and organizations looking to engage in this digital extension of our humanity. It shows, quite simply, how YOU will change the world.


How the Magic Happens!

What's different about what's happening on the Internet now, versus the way we've always done things, is the digitization of our relationships and networks. Social networks are not a new phenomenon — people have belonged to numerous networks since the beginning of humanity. Think of your own social spheres, which may include work friends, family members and neighbors. Now picture them not just as isolated from one another in our minds, but as overlapping at some points, and connected in public through you. We’re sharing information about ourselves and our networks online, which leads to more connections with other people and other networks. The mapping of those connections via online social network tools –in essence, creating large information pipes that didn't previously exist –puts things like word-of-mouth on steroids and speed.

The traditional media (cable news channels, newspapers and magazines, etc.) has a love/hate relationship with social technology… and with good reason. It’s revolutionizing how we send and receive information. It's not just that our current media structures are threatened (they are); it's also that there's an entire shift happening, both in how we obtain information and what we do with that information once we’ve processed it.

For starters, we’re not just consuming information, we sharing it, immediately and constantly. When we read a news story online, there’s usually a tool on the page that encourages us to “email this to a friend,” or post it to one of dozens of social networks. When we watch a funny video, we embed it on our own site or link to it so others will watch. When something happens that makes us go, “Wow,” we want to tell everyone we know.

And we can. But our sharing power reaches beyond our own personal relationships to the relationships and networks of our friends, and their friends’ and so on.

Picture billions of soap bubbles in a sink. Each bubble represents a different person, and the bubble size reflects that person's sphere of influence. Where bubbles connect and overlap represents our relationships with people around us.

We've always belonged to multiple spheres, but in the offline world, the piece that was missing was clear documentation or mapping of those relationships. We could exchange information about ourselves, but physical limitations and social expectations prevented us from widespread information sharing. You wouldn't, say, set up a conference call with a bunch of people you know casually to talk about your family vacation… it would have been expensive and culturally weird.

Now using a variety of tools — email, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, microblogging services like Twitter — we have the ability to create maps of our relationships. I don't mean maps in the pictorial sense, like a giant family tree or anything. I mean maps in the pathway sense. We are able to create and use very direct pathways to engage in immediate, many-to-many conversations with people in our social networks by sharing our experiences with one another.

Those pathways create the opportunity for us to take advantage of our relationships in revolutionary ways, particularly when we share information with each other, rather than simply receiving information passively from sources outside of our personal relationships.

 www.BKPubCurrents.com • www.deannazandt.com/sharethischange/