International Women’s Day highlighted the benefit of social media — the breakdown of the one definitive story into a kaleidoscope of stories, a broader narrative sparkling with a faceted truth.

The social stream on March 8 was filled with stories of women portrayed not just as mothers or wives, defined primarily by their place in the home. The stories were complex, as was the larger definition of women woven by these stories read together. In the cacophony of our era of self-broadcasting, a simpler narrative could not hold. For that, I think we should all be grateful. As a woman, I certainly am.

With both Happy International Women’s Day and Felicidades Mujeres among Twitter’s top trends, millions of stories were shared online, eliciting reactions that often added further nuance. Through social sharing, the conversation widens, reaching people who perhaps had never before entertained a certain position or hadn’t considered it deeply enough to compare it to their own views and respond.

We now each have millions of nuggets of information fed to us daily that, depending on our information consumption approach, can narrow or broaden our worldview. We are what we eat, in literature as in food. As Chimamanda Adichie beautifully illustrates in the TED video “The Danger of a Single Story,” a young Nigerian writer who has only read British and American children’s books will populate her own stories with blue-eyed children playing in the snow.

Adichie argues for a multi-threaded narrative that allows us to see stereotypes and move beyond them to have a fuller emotional response, a reaction beyond pity, for example. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete,” Adichie says. “It robs people of dignity.” While she does not mention social media, it struck me that she is advocating the kind of narrative that social media, especially when used with curiosity and the technological tools to facilitate curation, has made easier for us to compose.

One technological forum that capitalizes on this potential is Women on the Verge, founded by Tucsonan Ana Lewis. It reaches some 10,000 people through social media and facilitates conversations primarily among women about personal experience, self-improvement and professional advancement. It is about being supportive and nuanced and breaking stereotypes, and it has grown wildly in popularity. “It showcases how true this concept is — how ready we are for it,” Lewis said.

Also giving me hope is the recent viral sharing of the #KONY2012 video. There are certainly problems with the video — significantly, its lack of nuance — but the bright spot is that tens of millions of people watched a half-hour video about a devastating African war that has long been ignored outside of its geographical zone of suffering. With a click, millions of people were invited to care, and they did, at least enough to pass on the video.

Admittedly, millions of people watching a video does not stop a war. But it could add aspects to the narrative. It could begin a conversation. Through the conversation could grow empathy, the baseline for better human interaction in all of its forums.

Ana Lewis, founder of Women on the Verge

Ana Lewis always wanted a sister. As an adult, she found herself gravitating toward women’s groups for support in her personal and professional lives.

A web designer who works from home, she especially sought an online community of women, and she found something like that in the now-defunct online bulletin board Pleiades, which was targeted at women in technology and business owners who work from home.

In 1999, she designed what she was looking for and soon got 60 or so emails from women who wanted to be included. The problem was that they had to be manually entered into the group.

“The technology for what I wanted to do just didn’t exist yet,” Lewis said. She shut the online community down, unable to juggle managing the site on top of her other responsibilities.

A decade passed, and Lewis realized the time was right. The technology now existed to create the online conversations she craved, and the need for women to have a supportive and entirely un-catty forum in which to explore self-improvement was just as acute.

In 2009, Women on the Verge was resurrected, this time starting as a Twitter account. The website now gets more than 1 million hits a month from all over the world, and more than 200 women contribute blog posts, video blog posts and participate in a radio show. Women on the Verge is active on just about every social network out there, and @womenontheverge on Twitter now has more than 10,000 followers who exchange views on the monthly topics Lewis offers as talking points.

“We really do want to support each other,” Lewis said. “We’re really trying to break the stereotype” of women as catty and competitive. A Hispanic women in the field of technology, Lewis knows something about breaking stereotypes, and she’s passionate about helping other women do the same.

The success of the site “showcases how true this concept is and how ready we are for it,” she said. Many of the community members are authors or women in the field of technology, including Tucsonan Jessica Northey, who with more than 313,000 followers frequently makes it onto lists of Twitter powerhouses.

Participation in Women on the Verge is free, and the site is ad-free. In celebration of International Women’s Day today, the community is talking about sisterhood and how to build a supportive community. International Women’s Day, as well as Felicidades Mujeres, is trending on Twitter. That seems clear evidence that the community is growing.

I’ve already written about how much I like the Seed Library of Pima County Facebook page, but I thought I would take it a bit further and interview the person behind it. That person is librarian Justine Hernandez.

The page — like the seed library, which opened Jan. 28 — is new and still growing. It now has 254 fans. Hernandez’s method is propelled less by premeditated strategy and more by an intuitive sense of who her audience.

“The project just really invites community. It’s about community,” Hernandez said by way of explaining what drives her social media use. “We are just really wanting to engage the community.”

One way that she does that is to post a lot of photos. She uses her iPhone to snap photos of small and often little noticed gardens, as well as volunteers hard at work repackaging donated seeds into quantities more appropriately sized for a single person.

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge the faces involved,” she said. “People respond to visual things.”

The project involves a compelling mix of new and old technologies. The seeds are held in old card catalogs, long overshadowed by electronic databases. But electronic databases are key to promoting the project and ensuring its popularity. What is being promoted is not simply the library or sharing or even biodiversity, but also a renewed awareness of our agricultural past, Hernandez said. She herself is a new gardener.

Much of the funding the library received as part of the project went to buying books about gardening and seed saving. The seeds, which are all heirloom and open-pollinated seeds, were donated by local gardeners or seed companies.

So far, the promotion strategy seems to have worked. Hernandez says about two-thirds of the more than 6,000 seed packets in the library have been checked out and, she hopes, planted. Right now, librarians are encouraging people to get started, but eventually they will have to focus more on the return end of the check-out equation. “The idea is that it becomes over time self-sustaining” as people return seeds from their plants to the library and established gardeners continue contributing, Hernandez said.

The Facebook page was recently affected by the new Pima County social media guidelines, about which I hope to post more soon. The Pima County library branch pages now bear the county seal as part of the page’s main image, and employees posting to the page are called out by name in the Info section. There is also a link to Pima County’s social software commenting guidelines.

As I was curating TucsonCitizen.com’s Twitter feed during the State of the Union address last night, I noticed that President Barack Obama’s seemingly uncontroversial statement that women ought to receive pay equal to men coincided with a lot of Twitter chatter about women — three specific women, in fact.

One woman who was the subject of much discussion was Gabrielle Giffords. There were many tweets about how her hug with the president brought them to tears. There were also many tweets about how great she looks in red. There were a lot of tweets about the first lady, Michelle Obama, most of them about her crisp blue dress and later, about who designed it and how much it cost. There were several tweets about Hillary Clinton and her appearance – to what degree she had aged, the appeal of her outfit, the wisdom of wearing a headband.

This chatter, at least in the #SOTU feed as I observed it, far outweighed any substantial conversation about these women or their public role. In the context of Obama’s statement, I found it especially disturbing. It’s not that I am against observations of appearance or fashion. In high school, I aspired to be a fashion designer. I do think how one presents oneself is important. But the volume of the how-she-looks chatter struck me as a symptom of the larger problem: Women are still judged disproportionately by how they look, even accomplished women with important policy roles.

Sure, House Speaker John Boehner was the target of a fair amount of superficial chatter about the darkness of his tan and the color of his tie, but there was about an equal number of observations about his behavior, his policy positions and political strategy. The same was not true in regards to three of the high-profile women present that night.

For a broader look at the Twittersphere reaction, check out 10,000 Words’s State of the Union infographic.

The battle over whether Tucson Unified School District ought to allow students to enroll in a Mexican American studies course as anything but an elective has been simmering for months inside the legislative and judicial systems. Students and activists were stirred up about it, but few others seemed to pay all that close attention. But when TUSD’s board voted to end the Mexican American Studies program and began taking the books used to teach those courses out of classrooms, protest erupted.

TUSD denied that its reaction could be fairly characterized as banning books (in TUSD Governing Board President Mark Stegeman’s own words here). Nonetheless, people on the street were talking about what does or does not constitute a book ban, what is or isn’t American and what does or doesn’t spur learning. What was an Arizona issue of limited national interest became an issue that got the attention of people, especially literary people, across the country. Books, we all seem to agree, are important to learning. (Some would take it a step further and argue that they may be a key ingredient in surviving one’s childhood, to cultivating imagination and a sense of opportunity. I can attest that they were for me.)

Once the narrative that books and free speech are good and book bans are Orwellian got established, outrage spread. It was social media, which some describe as itself a threat to general literacy, that helped to fan the flames. Presente.org, which describes itself as a national organization to amplify the political voice of Latino communities, created an online petition, and it has been tweeted and retweeted with incredible speed. What real-world manifestation the social media indignation will take is to be seen. Here’s a small taste of what the feeds looked like today.

Tucson Arts Brigade has found a relatively painless way for supporters to donate to their cause. The self-described “civically engaged arts and education organization” has launched a web browser toolbar (which you can download here). Each time someone uses the toolbar to search the Internet or to shop, Tucson Arts Brigade gets a cut, which they use to organize mural painting, dance and puppetry events, among other things.

The idea is that you may not have time to volunteer or cash to hand over, but you probably do a fair bit of web searching. (You’re reading this blog post, after all.) Why not ensure that some piece of the revenue produced  goes to a good cause?

The technology that Tucson Arts Brigade is using comes from GoodSearch, a search engine that donates 50 percent of its sponsored search revenue to charities and schools designated by its users. The search is powered by Yahoo, and the money donated comes from advertisers. The idea was the brainchild of Ken Ramberg (the founder of JOBTRAK, now a division of Monster.com) and JJ Ramberg (an MSNBC anchor and the former director of marketing at Cooking.com). They figured diverting some of the $8 billion search engines make yearly to charities would be a good idea, and they created the technology to help make that possible. Since the company’s 2005 launch, lots of charities have come on board.

The toolbar is no panacea for nonprofit fundraising in a down economy, but it is easy. GoodSearch makes the stats available so you can track your impact in your chosen charity’s revenue. Tucson Arts Brigade has received $244.43 through GoodSearch since it started using the service in December 2010.

In this season of giving, however, this is probably one of the easier ways. That’s why, although administrators have been quietly using the technology for years, they sent out an email blast about the technology only more recently.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Jodi Netzer, the group’s outreach and marketing director. “We’ll see what happens.”

Netzer is especially excited about GoodShop, an online shopping service that sends a percentage of every purchase to a designated nonprofit.

If you’re going to do it anyway, why not send a little love to a cause you believe in?

Note: The initial post said that Tucson Arts Brigade began using the service in 2007. In fact, the group began using it last year.

Facebook has launched a new feature called Subscribe. If there’s a blogger you are particularly interested in following, you can subscribe to the posts they make public by clicking the Subscribe button on the top right side of their Facebook profile. For all this to work, the blogger must have activated the subscribe function (for which there are easy-to-follow directions here). I always like to hear about how you like to get your information, so if you have a preferred method that you think we could do more to facilitate, let me know. You’ll find all my contact info on the left side of the page.

In other news, Facebook has filed paperwork to form its own political action committee. Read: stepped-up lobbying. If you are interested in and/or concerned about privacy and the future of media, make a big note. The Hill reported that Facebook’s lobbying spending has totaled $550,000 for fiscal 2011.

Facebook is increasingly becoming the easiest or preferred way to log in to other applications. To use the popular music platform Spotify, you need now need to log in using Facebook. With Facebook apparently set to become your primary destination on the Internet, you will likely see this requirement more and more.

On a potentially more uplifting note, Mark Zuckerberg recently said at a Facebook event in Seattle (according to PaidContent’s Ben Elowitz): “The last five years have been about connecting all these people. The next 5 years are going to be about all the crazy things you can do now that these people are connected, and I think it’s going to be cool.”

It takes David Aguirre, the manager of Tucson’s Shane House apartments, a matter of hours to rent a place out. If a tenant gives him 24 hours notice before leaving, “No problem” is Aguirre’s response.

The last dozen or so times he’s had to find a new tenant for the Tucson Arts Coalition-owned digs, Aguirre has posted a Facebook status update notifying his more than 1,600 friends of the availability. He’s doesn’t want a deposit, but he does want a Facebook reference, a vouch from someone he actually knows.

“Instead of insurance, I’m getting assurance,” Aguirre said. “It seems to work. … It’s a much more personable kind of thing.”

Aguirre most recently posted a Facebook message about an open apartment Aug. 9. Within three hours, he was standing in front of the apartment with a Facebook friend who he didn’t know and one that he did. The deal was done.

“I felt comfortable with it,” Aguirre said. “It’s not a guarantee, but the second person takes some of the edge off. It could work the other way too. She (the tenant) might feel more comfortable with me.”

Sometimes one of Aguirre’s many Facebook friends replies to his posts. Sometimes the post is passed to a friend of a friend. Often he fills apartments by texting his current tenants a request for referrals. Craigslist, once the primo method of doing these things, is described by Aguirre as a “last resort.”

Why take a stranger when you could have a friend?