Another blog on an article written by Henry Jenkins. (Jenkins, a professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at USC, is a self proclaimed ACA fan, which he describes as a part fan, part academic. He has written about a dozen books on media and culture. For his complete bio on himself, see his website at: http://www.henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html) I like his style, so I decided to look to him when this Kony 2012 thing came out. Here it is if you haven’t watched it, you should:
I first heard about this on Facebook. The Kony video was going rampant and people were changing their profile pictures. The critics started immediately, with the quips that people were posting pictures that said “I watched a 30 minuet move, and now I’m a social activist” Jenkins in his article “Why youth are drawn to Invisible Children: Prefiguring Kony 2012” refers to this as slacktivism. Jenkins recognizes this point, but he also sees the whole Kony 2012 explosion in a different way. He sees is as a way that the youth can get socially active. It has been a concern for many years that the youth do not seem at all interested in politics, and society as a whole would benefit if the youth would educate themselves and go out and vote. Jenkins sees this he recognizes that “talking to members of Invisible Children shows how previous IC movies indeed played important roles in helping young people become socially active, though not always in clear, immediate ways.” I definitely agree that videos like this could launch youth into action, I just fear that people will blindly follow the one side of the story they are being feed. I mean, there are sob stories like this around the world, but also in the slums of the United States. I agree that Kony is a terrible human being, and something should be done, but there are so many more stories just like this around the world. I personally think that that our efforts should be more toward empowering the people of these nations. Educating them and giving them the ability to defend themselves will do the whole world more good than killing Kony, because his death will only leave an opening for another, just as horrible, leader to take his place.
I fear however that the recent news of one of the co-founders getting into legal trouble will squash the possibilities of the Kony movement (check out this Huffington Post article, if you don’t know what I am talking about). All of the people who I knew had supported the movement have become eerily quiet on the topic recently. It makes me wonder if this fad would have died out on it’s own anyways, or if it would have taken root. The video cardinally had a large effect on those who watched it.