Have we heard the last about Joseph Kony? Either way, it has been fascinating to watch the machine that drove his rise to infamy launch with footage of children carrying guns larger than themselves in Uganda, to the anti-Kony campaign’s producer, Jason Russell, threatening to release his own ‘invisible children’ on the people of San Diego.
The mainstream news tended to avoid the term “public masturbation” and leaned towards phrasing like CNN’s, “running through the streets of San Diego in his underwear.” Or the The Guardian’s more blunt, “running around the streets screaming in his underwear.”
In terms of the amount of dignity afforded to Russell, CNN scores higher. After all, “running through the streets of San Diego in his underwear” is not all that uncommon in that part of California. However, running ‘around’ and ‘screaming’, as The Guardian puts it, suggests the kind of mental state that may require white coats and tranquilizer darts.
The more sensational publications like The Daily Mail, TMZ, and the appropriately named Gawker were happy to be able to use the ‘public masturbation’ button located at the top left-hand corner of their keyboards. A key they haven’t been able to use since George Michael and Pee-Wee Herman were caught doing strange things in public. Both mainstream and ‘soft’ news sources used the word ‘meltdown’ to describe Russell’s mental state. That’s okay though, because the word looked better on him than it did on nuclear reactors, like Fukushima. Everyone, however, ignored the irony that Jason Russell managed to get himself arrested before Joseph Kony did… or will, ever.
But let’s get back to the start.
Being the Internet hound that I am, I was aware of the Kony 2012 video when it went up on March 5th on several online news aggregates and discussion forums. I didn’t bother watching it because naming the video ‘Kony 2012’ made me think it was an election campaign video for someone named ‘Kony’. Within the next two days, however, I knew everything about Joseph Kony, Invisible Children (the organization that made the video), Uganda, child soldiers, and charity funding, and I still hadn’t seen the video.
I watched the criticism towards the video emerge from the blogosphere just as Kony 2012 started popping up on my facebook newsfeed like spots on a teenager. The criticism tended to be quite thoughtful at first — scepticism at Invisible Children fiscal practices, their motivation, their facts. Then, as criticism turned towards the people involved in the Kony 2012 feeding frenzy — the pointlessness of armchair activism and the white people that do it — the mainstream media had finally caught on that something weird was happening in the internet tubes.
Today the You Tube video has more than 80-million views. Some sources say that it crests 113-million views, which may be, if you combine the vimeo and YouTube video estimates. This is a staggering number which easily ranks with total Eurovision Song Contest viewers, the population of Germany, and three times the population of Uganda, give or take the number of children that are tricky to count because they are invisible. It’s the kind of numbers, which make advertisers salivate into their cappuccinos.
It’s also a very difficult number to ignore, especially leaping out of obscurity, as the video did, into the faces of every computer-screen activist and self-made human rights watchdog in the Western hemisphere. The mainstream media, in its usual reserved style, picked up the ball and ran with it — past the goal line, past the sidelines, off the pitch, out of the stadium, and disappeared into the night. Every kind of journalist, editorialist, blogger, and pundit started racing around trying to find an angle to capitalize on the video — a video, which I highly doubt many people watched in its entirety.
Basically, though, you had two points of view — well three, if you think Ugandans have a point of view, which most of the Western media doubts they have. One is that the video is useful, the other is that the video is useless. Pro Kony 2012 people felt that despite dodgy facts, the shaky financial practices of Invisible Children, and the overt emotional heart-string-playing, the video does the job. We, after all, now know who Joseph Kony is, even if he hasn’t actually been in Uganda for a few years now. The Anti Kony 2012 people felt that the video did nothing except create a carnival-like atmosphere amongst celebrities, pundits, journalists, and regular folks who spent the entire time congratulating each other for caring about something while doing a grand total of nothing about it. Sort of like inviting all your friends over to your place before a well-planned big night on the town, and then getting so drunk nobody can make it out the door. Either way, from a mainstream media perspective — from the video’s initial posting, to the controversy over its content, to Jason Russell going bonkers on the streets of San Diego — the darker cloud hangs over the video itself, rather than what happened, or is happening, in Uganda.
What nobody seems to understand is how the video attracted so much attention. They understand what happened technically, but they don’t understand the driver behind it. After all, the last time something stirred up the Western world’s fancy like this was Rebecca Black’s Friday video; a poorly sung and produced pre-teen fantasy with terrible singing which represents everything banal and idiotic about American youth culture. That was until the video went viral and its popularity couldn’t be blamed on young people anymore. It turns out tastelessness can’t be confined to just middle-class suburban youth.
Here’s the twist though, a lot of the people that watched Rebecca Black’s Friday and made it popular are the same people that pushed Kony 2012 past the 100-million mark. Sure they also made Susan Boyle, Justin Bieber, and a dramatic chipmunk famous, but this… this is different. This is actually about something. Okay, in their youthful over-eager way they missed the mark with Joseph Kony by a few years, and they didn’t actually do anything aside from raise awareness for other people to not actually do anything, but for a brief second their eyes were open to the possibility that bad things are happening somewhere, and they felt uncomfortable about it.
And that’s something to feel hopeful about.
arindehoog 