By: Ronak Ghorbani

As part of my feature on social media and feminism I interviewed Katie Stanton, co-organizer of Fem 2.0 the conference about feminism and social media. The conference first took place in 2009 in Washington D.C. and their activism and lively discussions have continued on their blog.

Q: Why is it important to have a conference like Fem 2.0?

A: I think the conference makes it very real for people – that it’s a very serious thing. One of our priorities was to get people physically in the same room sitting next to each other because if you do everything online, there is a little bit of a disconnect; sometimes you forget these are real people. I just think that it’s very powerful to have people physically looking at each other face-to-face and talking to each other and networking.

Q: The Fem 2.0 conference explored the culture of linking and how linking between feminist blogs. How does this create a tight knit community?

A: In my day job, I work on new media and social media for a PR company in D.C. We’re very interested in how people are connecting with each other online and how you can kind of pull communities together in that way. What we noticed with the feminist world was that it was a little disjointed; people tend to only hangout with their so called friends online. They call that “echo chambers.” They’ll only link to certain people or they’ll only read certain other blogs. At a certain point, you’re going to lose your perspective when you’re doing that too much. You need to be able to link to a lot of other people to share traffic, to show they’re reading their blog because they can see it when you link to them – it pops up on their website – that’s a good way to network without actually having a network…The more you do that the more of a close connection you make with those websites. During the conference, [we brought] all those [feminist] organizations into the same room and bringing a lot of bloggers and online voices in the room with them. It really showed them, “Hey, we’re all working on the same thing and should be working together and sharing our networks and sharing our efforts.”

Q: I read that you were broadcasting #fem2 Tweets on a big screen.

A: To be honest, when we were doing the conference we didn’t have a lot of money. All the money we raised was total grass roots like me pulling my hair out…One of the big things we did before the conference to regularly involve people was Twitcasts which means every week on Twitter we would invite people to come in and discuss women’s issues for an hour…it really started pulling the community together. People knew we were hosting this and they would come and talk with us and they were so interested in the conference. So we wanted to engage them even though they might not be able to actually attend [the conference]. When you broadcast these conferences online, you get a lot more impressions made. People pay attention, they re-Tweet what you’re saying, they pass it onto their friends and you can make a big impact very quickly. We put Twitter on the screens so people could see themselves participating and so the speakers could watch and see what the audience.

Q: How does re-Tweeting make a big impact?

A: In terms of people seeing their friends Tweeting about something, they’re going to pay attention. If they’re interested, they’re going to ask them” hey what’s that? What are you talking about?” and they’ll Tweet them out. The most powerful thing on Twitter is a re-Tweet. When you post something interesting, you are posting it to your network. When someone in your network finds that interesting and re-Tweets it, they post it to their network –  that’s potentially hundreds of people with a single re-Tweet. So that’s a very valuable tool in terms of spreading your message and getting people to be engaged in the conversation and then they’ll come back to you for more.

Q: How is social networking and open source technology a natural extension of grassroots activism?

A: If you think about what grassroots activism used to be, it’s people getting together and sharing a cause. People, all of them, are doing the same thing at the same time and making their voices heard. When you’re talking about online networks, it’s the same thing. In many cases, it’s a lot easier because people…might not be able to get outside and go to a protest but they can go online and blog about something or re-Tweet something or sign a petition or e-mail their senator. What organizations are really trying to do is use those online tools and get the same results that they did with grassroots work. That’s not to say grassroots isn’t important because  it is, it’s crucial and you need to have people on the hill and you need to do all those things but when you have an online component, you can share it with that many more people all over the globe. 

Q: It’s also a good way to get people who may not know a lot about feminism learn about it through blogs.

A: Exactly. That was an important issue for me. I’m 23 I graduated from school two years ago and when I was in college…I was interested in women’s issues but I didn’t feel a whole lot of community. I didn’t know what was online because organizations weren’t reaching out. So when we were putting the conference together, that was a huge priority to me. [I] was calling college students and calling people in the D.C. area getting students out, getting women’s studies programs letting them know like here – you can meet the president of the Feminist Majority, you can meet the president of NOW you can come directly and hangout with ALW and talk to them because they want to hear from you.

Q: How can action-oriented feminist organization and online feminist communities work together to achieve equality for women?

A: I think that organizations like NOW and organizations like Feminist Majority have to understand that if they’re not online, the people they’re trying to reach out to are. They need to make an effort to connect with those people. There are millions of women who are online and who are talking and care about these issues…If you reach out and network with them and say, “Hey I want to help you. I want to pass on information to you. I want to make you a source for us. I want you to share these with you readers.” treat them like a journalist in way but give them that respect for having their voice and you can use those networks for so many great things they have so much energy. You just need to reach out to them.

Q: Do you think it’s important to teach older feminists who don’t know how to use the technology?

A: If they’re open to it, absolutely. I think that everyone should make an attempt to get familiar with this kind of thing because if you don’t do it now, you’re going to be left behind. More and more organizations are starting to realize this – not just feminist organizations but everybody. It’s funny because that is my day job, teaching people how to do this.

Q: How is the internet a valuable tool for feminists?

A: It’s incredibly valuable because it allows us to connect with women that we didn’t have the opportunity to before. We can get very caught up in our own bubble so this is an opportunity to reach out and talk to new people…Being online and new media is about creating relationships with people and it’s a great opportunity to take the time and do it. I also think that we tend to forget the women who aren’t online – there is a digital divide – and I think that part of the feminist movement should be focused on reaching out to people face-to-face doing community work, doing international work. Really finding those women, reaching out to those women and knowing what they’re going through because a lot of people are online but not everybody, not by a long shot.