Berkman Buzz: September 21, 2012

As is now commonly known, on May 17, 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a series of very candid comments at a private fundraiser held in the Boca Raton home of private equity manager Marc Leder. As Mother Jones reported on September 17, someone present at that fundraiser (we have no idea whether it was a guest or someone working at that event) planted a video camera in the room and captured portions of the audio and video of Romney’s talk. I will leave the political import of this event to others (and there has certainly been plenty of commentary), but I wanted to take a closer look at whether the recording violated any laws and the consequences of that determination.

Timely #copyright art. by Annemarie Bridy, Graduated Response American Style: 'Six Strikes' Measured Against Five Norms http://bit.ly/TaycIB
—David Ardia (@dsardia)

Those are diverse conferences – some more academic and others more action-oriented – and they have different thematic and disciplinary focus. However, they are all in the field of Internet/technology and society.

However, even if to a certain degree they all build upon an interconnected community of those interested in technological and societal issues, I am amazed how diverse they are in terms of gender inclusion. In other words, in terms of gender, some conferences are able to engage a diverse set of speakers and participants, in which women are also present, while others largely include almost only men in their programs. To give you an example, the organizers of Wikisym were almost all men: 89% of the Symposium Committee, 78% of the Program Committee, and 80% of the program of speakers were men (according to the data provided on the program web page).

Parenting is hard. Many parents find parenting in an era of social media to be confusing, in part because they must advise their children to make sense of spaces that they don’t understand themselves. It’s easy to be afraid of what’s new, but by focusing on technology, parents often lose track of the underlying social issues that their children are trying to navigate.

In many ways, the advice that children need to negotiate networked publics parallels advice that parents have always given when their children encounter public spaces. To address online safety concerns, parents need to help build resilience generally. With that in mind, I encourage parents who are concerned about online safety issues to initiate three important conversations with their children.

I just spent the weekend at Medicine 2.0, an amazing conference on social media, mobile apps and the Internet as they pertain to health care. Granted, as a health blogger I’m a little biased. But what I saw is really the future of medicine.

Health care needs transforming. It costs way too much, for one thing. And while we’ve made tremendous discoveries and stretched the capabilities of medicine in incredible ways, we aren’t necessarily getting healthier. And in all our discovering and stretching, in all our cool technologies and emphasis on efficiency, we risk losing the personal connections that can be so crucial. Social media can help with all of this, for two simple and important reasons.

Ty @natematias! New post: Mexico's Networked Social Movements #YoSoy132 http://bit.ly/QGrlko w/@andresmh @antonioattolini @schock @lilaroja
—Sasha Costanza-Chock (@schock)

Over the past week, anti-American protests spread across North Africa and the Middle East in response to an American-made anti-Islam video that mocks the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a lecherous fraud. As a result, both Google and various countries have moved toward either restricting access to the controversial video or YouTube as a whole.

The Philippines has recently passed an anti-cybercrime law which aims to protect the security and rights of internet users. But journalists and bloggers fear that the new law could lead to the curtailment of internet and media freedom in the country.