March began with an internet phenomenon. Kony 2012.
Now I'm sure everyone's getting a bit bored of this by now but there's something rather interesting about it. As a student, social networking sites tend to get logged onto automatically every time I turn my laptop on. Facebook is allowed its own tab; always there in the background ready to entertain me for that occasional tea break I allow myself after some heavy reading or carefully crafted essay writing. On Wednesday 7 March, what I was not expecting as I innocently undertook the daily ritual of signing in, was one video being posted onto the news feed by about a third of my friends list. This video was titled simply 'Kony 2012' and would take over my internet and dominate student conversations for the next few days.
Interesting then, that when I mentioned it to my Dad, he had no idea what I was talking about. He's normally clued up on this sort of thing but when I mentioned the name 'Kony', he stared at me blankly. Remarkable...
In case you didn't know, this campaign was an effort by the non-profit organisation Invisible Children to 'make Kony famous' in an effort to raise awareness about the atrocities he commits in the country he supposedly rules; Uganda. These atrocities include forcing children to become soldiers and young girls into the sex trade. The video the organisation released into the world aimed to raise support for his arrest. Now, many people I spoke to had never heard of Joseph Kony let alone the organisation Invisible Children. Yet within a few days of the video being posted on YouTube it had become an internet sensation.
On Monday 5th, the video was uploaded to the internet. On Wednesday 7th it had taken over Facebook's news feed and almost every status either had the video link attached, was encouraging people to watch it, or was sceptically blaming people for clogging up their page with the exact same thing. Either way, it got people talking.
It didn't get the UK news sites talking though. Not for a few more days at least. (I'd like to think this is because my friends are news savvy and find interesting news stories much quicker than the rest of the world... but this probably isn't the case!) Anyway, the most articles and comment pieces appeared on the BBC News site around the 10th... is this because there was so much research to do? Was Invisible Children not the reliable organisation that the wise, young users of Facebook had believed it to be?
Certainly for the next week or so there were numerous backlashes at the group, and they in turn published a response to the sceptics on their website. But I'm not interested in this... oh no. What I'm interested in, is the way the news spread.
Is this a sign of our times? The video in question starts with the statement that 'right now there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago.' Scary thought right?
Which goes to suggest that the internet (social networking sites in particular), is now the easiest and quickest way to get information to the world. Even the news advertises every reporter's Twitter page when they appear on TV. It seems as though the newspaper, as a way of communicating information, has transformed into social websites. Is this a sign of our times? Our generation? Although people like my parents hadn't heard of the Kony 2012 campaign immediately, they eventually did...through me. As Marvin Gaye once said (or sung if you want to be picky), they "heard it through the grapevine."
But let's remember what started that little line of whispers... the internet. So this just leads me to propose one question.
Will the street protests and campaigns of the past become online videos that people can 'like' from the comfort of their desk chair, with a cup of tea in one hand whilst the other acts like an eager activist, just waiting to click on another link to a campaigning cause?
This, my friends, could be the future. We could become virtual protesters.
Or maybe we won't, and this is a load of Orwellian-styled 1984-inspired tosh. Either way, even the sceptics have to admit that Invisible Children's approach to campaigning and spreading the world took over the internet, if only for a few days. And it was clever.
Very clever.