Social Good Summit: Changing the World Through New Technology

Bloggers, media, NGOs, celebrities, and global thought leaders from a variety of public health and human rights spectrums converged this week on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for the Social Good Summit-- presented by Mashable, 92nd Street Y, and the United Nations Foundation--to discuss the power of innovative thinking and technology to solve the world’s greatest challenges. Meanwhile, about 40 blocks south in Midtown Manhattan, UN Week unfolded for high-level government agencies and officials in the 66th session of the General Assembly. Actually, there are so many big events happening this week that The Daily Beast announced the world has come to NYC.

What happens when you place United Nation members, health experts, social entrepreneurs, activists, athletes, and some of the most media-savvy professionals together? A social media extravaganza focused on how to change, help, and better our world from a global perspective. A dynamic dialogue of such range, depth, and inspiration that the outcomes could, in fact, be earth changing.

The Social Good Summit opened with Ted Turner’s thoughts on war and why the United Nations remains relevant. One of Turner’s biggest focuses, however, was also on how population size demands more focus on family planning. In a later session that day, Raj Shah, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) echoed similar thoughts when he took the stage to discuss “Developing Technology for the Developing World: the Big Challenges.” Shah's focus on the Horn of Africa tells how deep this crisis currently and how it could become even more so.

Watch live streaming video from mashable at livestream.com

Not surprisingly, such great interviews from some of our world’s greatest thinkers and innovators continuously roared across most organizations’ Facebook pages because the entire meeting is available on Livestream. While highly relevant, how to ensure audiences don’t get overwhelmed by these short, successive, and numerous talks?

Women in America Less Interested in "Women's Interest" Magazines

When reports come out in America that major print magazines are on the decline, it’s no surprise to a country where news and entertainment gatherers increasingly turn to faster, flashier digital options.

Traditionally, "women’s interest magazines" (think fashion, beauty, home and garden, etc.) have held the lion’s share of U.S. print magazine revenues. According to a recent report by the Auditor Bureau of Circulation, mags like Redbook, which has been alive and kicking since 1903, have seen their circulation drop dramatically. Today, with a circulation of a little over 100,000, Redbook has lost 81% of its readers from 2001.

The other top losers in women’s interest mags include Good Housekeeping, which reported a major circulation drop of 67%, and Woman’s Day, with a loss in readership of 77.3%. Top fashion and beauty mags have also seen readers turning a blind eye, with publications like Allure and Glamour both losing roughly half of their audiences.

With women’s print magazines going the way of the dinosaurs for the past decade, it is particularly interesting to see circulation numbers diminishing in the “domestic” category. And when it comes to what publisher’s dub “women’s interest” print mags, it seems that women just aren’t that interested anymore.

Should print advertisers chalk it up to digital media trends, or are women ‘just not into them’ for a larger reason? Is the format of the magazine the driving force for its decline, or is it the content?

As far back as 2000, Salon culture critic Ann Marlowe declared that women’s magazines were dead:

“Today's women's magazines are 19th century in their insistence on the indoors as woman's sphere. The world of the women's magazines is an indoor world, one of trying on clothes, of shopping for makeup and applying it.

…Young readers don't realize that the content is driven not by some definitive vision of what a woman is, but only by outdated visions of what women will buy. The magazines themselves have become institutions, part of our culture's definition of femininity, but we forget that their version of womanhood is but a blip in the great screen of time.”

On the Internet, sites like Jezebel and Feministing seem to generate large readerships, with scores of progenies cropping up every day, suggesting that women haven’t lost interest in content specifically produced to cater to their gender. In fact, the Huffington Post just added a women’s section to its news website. And Jane Pratt, the original publisher of the cult ‘90s teen magazine, Sassy, later to publish the more mainstream, not-so-sassy Jane, has now come out with a web-based magazine , xoJane.

In 2007, AdAge found that women were increasingly turning towards more interactive forms of media; the number of women blogging at least once a week rose to 30% at the time of the study. More likely than not, these women are reading and reposting web-based content, not extracting the latest diet trend from Redbook, or reposting an interior design trend piece from Good Housekeeping.

What do you think? Do you like “women’s interest” magazines? If so, do you prefer online to print?

Girls Lead at Google Science Fair

Editor's Note: This post is authored by Virginia Williams who is the Content Producer of the Global Motherhood Exhibition at the International Museum of Women. You can follow her personal blog here.

Last week, three girls won top honors in Google's Science Fair. According to the New York Times, the first place winner, Shree Bose, started dabbling in science in the second grade, when she theorized and then put into trial the idea that kids would eat spinach, if it were only blue.

What was her winning entry several years later at the ripe age of 17? Oh, just a potential remedy for treatment-resistant ovarian cancer. Think this is an anomaly? Hardly, the other two winners tackled equally challenging public health concerns. Why are we surprised that girls are capable of greatness, even in science, just like boys?

This event reminded of the main reason I moved to San Francisco, to the heart of US technology and social enterprise, in 2008. The prior year, as a fellow with the Bay Area Video Coalition's premiere Producer's Institute for New Media Technologies, me and my team created the prototype for a girls' social network for social good -- a place where girls could create projects for social and environmental change via the support of other females. I was inspired in part by my then 8-year-old niece, Raina, whose Internet aptitude was comparable to a mini- Sun Microsystems engineer but was at the mercy of content limited to Barbie gossip “auto-chat” and Club Penguin. At 9, her frustration and boredom with the available options led her, like many other girls, to drift to Facebook, a site that technically limits memberships to kids over 14 but nonetheless is rife with young victims and perpetrators of bullying and harassment. Tween-age girls (9-13) were, and still are to a large extent, left behind when it comes to quality, monitored Internet content, with the exception of some recent launches like New Moon Girls.

Instead of being afraid of what social media “might do to our kids,” specifically girls, we need to be more proactiv -- accepting, finally, that social media is a part of our kids’ lives, and that they need more information, not less, to learn how to use it responsibly. We need to encourage our schools to develop media literacy programs, and at home, use resources available to parents like Common Sense Media or the Media Awareness Network.

Within the international development context, says Linda Raftree from Plan International on Alternet, social media has been virtually untapped for its potential to empower girls and women. The Canadian government recently launched a 5-year plan to measure the impact of social media on girls, as reported by the Huffington Post’s Stephanie Marcus. But a closer look at the plan, crafted by the Atlantic Status of Women Ministers reveals that strategy does not include media literacy training, just public awareness and education. Do we really need another longitudinal study to tell us the effect of social media on girls?

Since I’ve been working with the International Museum of Women, I have witnessed the power of creative expression to promote gender equality and human rights first hand, and it has reinforced my desire to create a parallel outlet for young girls. Although my start-up idea stalled for various reasons, including the economic downturn and the fact that I wasn’t meeting the right people on the business development end who could help make it happen, the tide may be turning. I recently joined a Bay Area collaborative workspace called the HUB, where social entrepreneurs and social change consultants can collaborate and cultivate projects that will have measurable social impact but will also be sound businesses.

So, I think I’m on the brink of “restarting my start-up.” I guess you could say I’ve been inspired by blue spinach, and as I am frequently, by the power of girls.

"Gay Girl in Damascus" Blog: A Work of Great Fiction

A poster that appeared on a "Free Amina" facebook page.

Today, the person behind the popular confessional blog site "Gay Girl in Damascus" revealed their true identity. Blogger Amina Abdallah, known to devout readers from across the globe as a Syrian American lesbian with a talent for capturing everything from the excitement of the Arab Spring to sharing intimate, sensual poetry, was revealed to be...a man. Not only that, "Amina" is in fact a 40 year-old white American man currently studying in the UK by the name of Tom MacMaster.

The contempt felt by those who once followed him, or worse, those who only discovered him today through this new found notoriety (including this blogger, real name Amity Bacon), seems to have reached a fever pitch. And the reasons are fairly plain to see, as any white male blogger can attest.

The idea of a westerner born of white male privilege impersonating a queer Arab woman in order to have his voice heard is surely a painful irony. And I can only imagine that actual, real life members of the LGBT community in Arab nations that have struggled to get their messages out to the international community are more than a bit upset that they haven't been heard over all the media hype MacMaster has been able to drum up through his dalliance in fiction writing.

"Abdallah" wasn't your typical unknown blogging hobbyist. After garnering enough attention in her responses to the uprisings she supposedly witnessed firsthand, she was commissioned to contribute to various news sites. She even had a facebook account, filled with pictures MacMaster had stolen from another facebook user, as well as fan pages on the social networking site (yes, pages plural). And when MacMaster was bored with his little fiction project, he conveniently implied in his posts that Amina Abdallah had gone missing and was abducted by security services, which of course only led to more support, and, one can imagine, more fan pages. The State Department was reportedly opening up an investigation as well.

I understand the anger surrounding this. Especially if you see this video of MacMaster explaining himself and how he was driven by vanity to create this character. At this point he is probably envisioning future book deals, talk show appearances, and a life of glamorous celebrityhood from here on out.

But before we're so quick to dismiss this as a cheap hoax devoid of any lessons to be learned, here's a question to consider: where do you get your news? And what are the sources for that news?

In America, the number of US-based foreign correspondents has only dwindled as our military reach has skyrocketed. Conversely, in countries where first amendment rights are not protected, particularly in the Middle East, informal means of communication such as blogging, twitter, and other social networks have become a major source of information for the global community. In these types of circumstances, is it a complete surprise that myths and lies can be perpetuated like never before?

There are no easy answers to fix this media environment, but if there is a cautionary tale here it's this: however enticing a wide open internet may be, blogs and social media will never replace a functioning media--that is, a media comprised of trained journalists, fact checkers, and editors that are neither beholden to government nor corporate institutions. Is such a thing possible? Probably not, but it is something to strive for.

After Egypt, Secretary Clinton Takes on Internet Freedom

Over the past weeks, the world has watched as the Internet and social media played credible, if not vibrant, roles in the toppling of oppressive regimes in both Tunisia and Egypt. As an activist for the public health and human rights of females, frankly, I feel profound satisfaction just typing that last sentence because in both examples, the mass showed collective voice, power, and the strength to fight back -- and win -- even when access to the Internet was revoked.

Undoubtedly, momentum and solidarity arose from both in person and Internet discussions, then grew into collective action followed by formidable outcomes. No one can argue, however, access to technology can have profound social, economic, and political consequences. From public health to women's rights, texting, cell phones, and the Internet -- specifically, FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube -- are all tools that can potentially create a better future, a freer world, for all. In fact, the picture shown here reflects a young protester in Beirut with a mock ad showing both Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak "friending" one another via FaceBook. Both, of course, were recently ousted using some of these very social media tools to help force political upheaval.

This afternoon Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke from Georgetown University about Internet freedom. She cited abundant examples of how profound the Internet has become due to the 3 billion people worldwide who are using it and hailed it "the world's town square, classroom, marketplace, coffee house, and nightclub."

Last year, Clinton gave a speech announcing the Internet as a top priority in foreign policy. Today she discussed that just "last week we [the U.S. Government] launched Twitter feeds in Arabic, and Farsi, adding to the ones we have in French and Spanish."

Clinton added, "We'll start similar ones in Chinese, Russian and Hindi. This is enabling us to have real-time two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block."

But what about the governments that do block? Clinton singled out China, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, and Vietnam as countries that restrict access to the Internet or that arrest bloggers who speak out against their country's policies. Indeed, the Christian Science Monitor's Hillary Clinton's Plan to Topple Dictator's with an Open Internet was one of the most leading headlines of the day, because although Clinton adamantly supports the freedom of the Internet and made just realizations as to the impact the Internet has on our current and future world, she still acknowledged that the United States does not recognize a "silver bullet" approach. Yet, Clinton said after spending $20 million on funding already, an additional $25 million of supportive grants is forthcoming.

The Huffington Post highlighted one of Clinton's strongest assertions:

The Internet creates a 'dictator's dilemma' where oppressive regimes 'choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing -- which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression, and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked.'

Agence-France Press (AFP) reported that Clinton's speech came on the same day that "a US judge was holding a hearing in Virginia into a US government attempt to obtain information about the Twitter accounts of people connected with WikiLeaks."

Photo credit: Washington Post