Chapter One: The Power of Sharing
(pre-copyedited version)
Something fundamental has not changed at all about change: stories still come first. Before any change happens, online or offline, before you get your phonebanking, your petitions, your door-knocking, your lobby days, your email campaigns, your anything– change starts with stories. Our stories. Storytelling has been the most powerful building block for social change since the beginning of time… think about how long humans have been sitting around the campfire telling each other what's going on. Social networking gives us unprecedented power to share our stories with more people than we ever imagined.
What happens when you tell stories? Two very magical things: you build trust with other people in your network, and from there you build empathy. Note that I'm not talking about sympathy. Sympathy is when you feel badly for someone who's had something bad happen to them. Empathy is when you actually share the emotions that other people have and express. It's a powerful, deeply primal experience.
The trust we create on social networks fuels the empathetic response we have to one another, even if we don't know each other that well. All of us have stories, experiences and opinions to share as foundations for the change we make in the world. As we'll see, sharing subverts our traditional notions of power around information, and it offers a must-seize opportunity for democratization.
