Why’d you need to tell the world about your perfectly cooked waffles? And does anyone want to know that your taxes were filed “just in time”? Most of us post a self-indulgent tweet or status update from time to time (or make fun of our friends for doing so). But “Share This!” author and Web 2.0 Expo New York speaker Deanna Zandt disagrees that the postings lack value.

“All of us sharing these little tidbits of our lives… is a really radical shift from what we’ve experienced before,” she said in a recent interview with us. “We’re able to infuse our values into those conversations and from there you start to create empathy and empathy is a very fundamental building block for any kind of social change.”

This relatively new way of community and relationship building has, as Deanna writes in her new book, shifted our cultural consciousness as to how we connect with others, including those outside our usual social circles. It’s also something she’ll be talking about at Web 2.0 Expo New York this September in her session The Free-for-All Web and the Secret Tyrants We All Are. (Come see it by registering now with 25% discount code webny10scm4 today.)

Deanna recently talked to us about her book, her session, and how the relationship between social media and social change has evolved. Listen to the full audio interview now.

Online Versus Offline Relationships

The importance of these online interactions shouldn’t be underestimated, Deanna said, just because they don’t take place face to face.

“I stopped a number of years ago saying ‘in real life’ to represent my offline life because I realized that – for me anyway – that my online life and my offline life are probably equally important to me at this point and have different but pretty equal value,” she said. “I value the networks that I belong to. I think we have to start thinking about it less as something that’s real versus not real and more as something that is just happening in difference spaces. And I think that we’re in this giant transitional moment where we don’t necessarily understand or can comprehend how we need to accomplish things…

“Certainly these tools shouldn’t be a replacement for any other kind of interaction or organizing if you’re political or anything else, but they can complement it; they can facilitate it… We’ve seen the power of Meetup, that’s always trotted out as the example, but I don’t think it can be underestimated the real drive that people have to connect with one another and to translate that into offline relationships.”

Social Injustice and the Web

Deanna cited an incident from last summer as an example of how Facebook, Twitter and other platforms have changed how we understand and respond to social injustice.

“There was a pool from a country club in Philadelphia that banned a group of African American kids,” she said. “The director of the country club actually said, ‘We were afraid they were going to change the complexion of the pool.’” After hearing about this, Deanna said she did “all the right activist things” like calling the country club, retweeting the story, posting it on Facebook and otherwise spreading the word.

“But what was more interesting was in the following days after that… people started to share their stories of the first time that they remember being discriminated against as children,” she said, referring to what she saw on her Twitter stream and Facebook newsfeed. “And it was devastating. It was story after story after story… the people that were sharing them were colleagues of mine and were people that I didn’t know at all but just had decided to follow because they looked interesting and it was just coming at me from every angle and I realized I that wouldn’t have had this experience without social media…

“They allowed me to be a voyeur into a situation that I otherwise wouldn’t have been privy to. It didn’t change the action that I took. I did the right things. But what it did do was give me a much more fundamental understanding and emotional human understanding of systemic structural racism in American. That’s to me how building up those little connections over time can really have a profound emotional impact. I think that that’s a lot of what’s been missing from our interactions with one another in the public space for a long time.”

In her book, Zandt cites a Pew Research Center study that claims people who participate in social networks have discussion networks that are 20% more diverse than those not on social networks. This wider variety of perspectives, Deanna said, prevents staleness and inertia in our social systems.

“Creating a thrivable ecosystem whether that’s a society or a product or whatever that may be is a lot like DNA. If you get a bunch of the same DNA mixing around it’s no good. A species mutates poorly and dies off,” she said. “If you bring in a variety of DNA the species strengthens itself as it evolves. And scholars have noted that if we account for tension and difference, if we admit it, and we talk about it and we make it part of our process that we ultimately as individuals and as societies make better decisions that are more valuable and sustainable.”

Gov 2.0

How is social media changing our political process? Despite the success of frequently cited online political campaigns such as President Obama’s, Deanna said politics is still very much about money.

“While The internet has shifted someone’s ability to raise that money and perhaps engage small donors in a way that they haven’t been engaged before, it still doesn’t change the fact that money, in my opinion, plays too much of a part in that process.

“But what it can do is a lot of what the Gov 2.0 movement is working on with open data, open transparency projects, to really shed light on how our government actually works. And what we can do with that data is pretty stunning. You already see these incredible visualizations where people are laying over housing maps on top of migrations… and showing how people move around because of housing costs and things like that. And it’s giving us real ammunition to say, ‘These are the things that need to change.’”

Open Standards for Social Networking

One complaint Deanna said she has with social networks like Facebook is the level of control these services have over one’s information versus the control a more open system would have, such as email.

“What I would love to see is less of a focus on what’s the latest service and what’s the latest greatest thing and more of drive towards open web standards for social networking so that people can use different tools that they like,” she said. “Email was built in a way that it just works. If I have a Hotmail address and you have a Gmail address I don’t have to download a plug-in so that we can email each other. It just sort of works. I would love to see some sort of set of standards that facilitates that and then let different services compete for what their features are. But please, for the love of god, give me more control over my life again.”

Interesting in learning more? Check out the complete interview by clicking on the audio (above), come to Deanna’s session, or buy her book.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. She read Deanna’s book, “Share This!” in prep for this interview, and really enjoyed it.

Register here with code webny10scm4 to save 25% on Web 2.0 Expo conference passes.

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