This is a deep dive interview with Marcia Stepanek. She is a journalist, new media strategist, NYU professor and an award winning news and features editor. Eric:  Tell us about yourself.   Marcia:  I have been covering the intersection of technology and its impact on society and business, for pretty much the past 25 years. I did a new media fellowship at Stanford and went out there all primed from Hearst Media in Washington to cover the shrinking middle class in America and the increasing division between the haves and have‑nots.   Instead, when I got out to Silicon Valley everyone said, "Are you crazy? We are in the middle of Silicon Valley, and there's a revolution happening here." Certainly, there was at the time I was out there with the rise of e‑commerce and with the rise of technology.   I switched my entire curriculum in order to study the impact of communications and new media technology and the law on business, on technology itself, and on the way people advocate for social change. Even back then, we saw the center of power moving from the center of establishment organizations to outside the organizations.   The evolution and implications of that happening, as you well know, has been going on for over a decade and is still continuing.   Eric:  You had to shift from class warfare to digital revolutions.   Marcia:  Often, they're the one and the same.   Eric:  Now you've got this book coming out about digital swarms, which talks about digital swarms becoming even more powerful and more sophisticated.   Marcia:  It's more about how networks and communities have been evolving and scaling. As they mature, a more sophisticated and permanent presence is created. We're seeing a lot of people organizing themselves into networks. Certainly this is also occurring politically around various interest groups. It also occurs in more of these informal communities and around communities of political interest.   In many ways, we have seen them start to exercise their muscle. I'm not talking so much about the Arab Spring.  I'm not talking about all of that.  I'm talking, now, about a communities ability to organize very rapidly as accountability networks.   For example, a couple of years ago, the Komen Foundation, a foundation that was dedicated to fighting breast cancer, made some controversial decisions.  The organization did not communicate these decisions very transparently or openly with so many of its supporters  In fact,  it started trying to dissuade people when they found out about some of the decisions that were being made, from commenting. This kicked up an angry swarm among supporters who, over the course of three days, were not only were able to hold some of the leaders of the Komen Foundation accountable for those decisions, but wouldn't stop organizing around this until some of the leadership had in fact been changed.   We've seen this repeatedly. We've seen this when people get angry at Rush Limbaugh, or get angry at any number of incidents. We saw this with the Stop SOPA campaign. We can see communities organized very quickly to achieve something, a singular goal, very rapidly and very clearly.  All in the course of a week or less. These aren't accidents. This basically show that these networks have matured and that they're pretty consistent. They don't organize overnight. They don't always express themselves,