Kony 2012 Through a Prism of Video Advocacy Practices and Trends SAM GREGORY* [email protected] Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article/4/3/463/2189429 by guest on 27 September 2021 Keywords: advocacy; drillability; social media; spreadability; transmedia Kony 2012 is the most rapidly disseminated human rights video ever (Visible Measures Blog 2012), and has fuelled significant policy and practical momentum in the United States and internationally around the situation of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).1 In this review I consider Kony 2012 through the prism of video advocacy principles. How does it function as video within a campaign, and how does it function as storytelling driven by audience and providing a space for action? I then consider how this model is challenged/enhanced by the possibility of more diverse voices around a human rights issue, and a potential balance of the spreadability of a single narrative with a drillability that facilitates a diverse, deep range of voices. Principle 1: Video Should be Part of a Campaign, Complementing Other Forms of Activism Human rights video in a campaign context is most effective when it comple- ments other forms of organizing, mobilizing and advocacy – people taking to the streets, lobbying their elected representatives, using ‘boomerang’ strat- egies to engage distant publics to action, collating and mobilizing powerful evidence for justice. Much initial criticism of Kony 2012 occurred in the absence of discussion about the organization behind it, Invisible Children (IC for short) and the organizing work they have done to create a broad, committed community of student activists in the United States (US) (dis- cussed in Kligler-Vilenchik, 2012). IC have brought documentaries on north- ern Uganda to thousands of US schools in seven years, mobilized student organizing teams across the United States, and supported grass roots communications and policymaker advocacy via projects like the LRA * Program Director, WITNESS, 80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn NY 11217. WITNESS trains and supports people to use video in human rights advocacy. This review essay is adapted from the author’s blog post ‘Kony 2012: Juggling Advocacy, Audience and Agency When Using #Video4Change’ (March 17th 2012) http://blog.witness.org/2012/03/kony-2012-juggling- advocacy-audience-and-agency-when-using-video4change/ 1 See the discussion by Michael Poffenberger of Resolve, an advocacy ally of Invisible Children on the ‘Stories and Fables’ panel at the 2012 Knight MIT Conference on Civic Media, http://livestre.am/3Yr46. Journal of Human Rights Practice Vol 4 | Number 3 | 2012 | pp. 463–468 DOI:10.1093/jhuman/hus024 # The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Review 464 Crisis Tracker and collaborations with policy–lobbying organizations like Resolve.2 In past campaigns, IC built up a following by releasing roughly one major film project a year, holding screenings which students would attend and then getting them to participate in big public actions (which they would then see reflected back to them in future film productions). This type of spectacle-based action has been criticized as commodified activism (Brough, 2012) but it has Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article/4/3/463/2189429 by guest on 27 September 2021 been effective in building a strong core base of support among high school and college students. Core has been the role of in-person screenings alongside speakers with expert or direct knowledge in nurturing the strong collective nodes of activism which kick-started the online push on Kony 2012 (Lotan, 2012). Research by University of Southern California (USC) scholars (Jenkins, 2012) reveals IC members share a strong sense of community and purpose and suggests strongly that – for all the subsequent criticism of the viral reach of the Kony 2012 online video as clicktivism or slacktivism (for example, see Al-Jazeera, 2012) – the core constituency of IC is not cursory in its engagement. The IC team did not expect Kony 2012 to be so successful, so quickly. They had aimed for the video to build up to their 20 April action and to get a total of 500,000 views in 2012, not 100 million in ten days. As CEO Ben Keesey acknowledged to The New York Times (Preston, 2012) in some senses they were too successful, too early with this campaign because the online component overshadowed the offline organizing and in-person screen- ings that usually characterize the launch of their advocacy: ‘What we are working on now is to speed up the pivot of the campaign from awareness into action. We thought the awareness piece would take until at least April 20. Now, with this huge viewership, we are trying to translate all this excitement into action.’ Paradoxically the success of the video itself seems to have in this case detracted from the engagement potential of the campaign if not the public policy leverage that could be extracted from the attention. Although original- ly intended to build up to large ‘Cover the Night’ in-person events on 20 April, ultimately IC drastically scaled back plans, focusing instead on small local events and community service projects. Principle 2: Storytelling Should be Audience-Oriented and Should Provide a Space for Action IC’s core audience is youth in the United States. As Neta Kligler-Vilenchik notes of an earlier, also much-watched IC film: ‘The main strength of the movie to most IC members is the feeling of identification with the protago- nists – the three film-makers and future IC founders, young people not much older than themselves, who go out to Uganda, encounter a social issue and launch a movement.’ One intern notes: ‘The movie is just very raw, and 2 See Invisible Children and Resolve, LRA Crisis Tracker http://www.lracrisistracker.com. 465 Review ...even though they were older than me they were kids, and you see these kids just go, they see something, they run into a problem and they’re like, OK, now we have to fix this problem.’ Alongside the IC team, the agents of change in Kony 2012 are the youth who have acted and will act in solidarity with the campaign. From a movement-building perspective in the United States this makes perfect sense. There are evident critiques of this storytelling frame, which emphasizes US Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article/4/3/463/2189429 by guest on 27 September 2021 youth’s agency above all else. Writer Dinaw Mengestu (2012) captures this best: ‘In the world of Kony 2012, Joseph Kony has evaded arrest for one dominant reason: those of us living in the western world haven’t known about him, and because we haven’t known about him, no one has been able to stop him.’ Leshu Torchin (2012) has also framed this within a concept of the ‘narcissism of pity’, in which every struggle relates back to the experience of the advocates, not the victims or survivors. In other reviews in this issue of the Journal, Mark Drumbl (2012), David Hickman (2012) and Lars Waldorf (2012) also critically analyse this storytelling in more depth in rela- tion to tropes around child soldiering, modes of documentary approach and new forms of muscular humanitarianism. However, an audience-driven approach to advocacy is a core part of much existing practice of effective advocacy: find an audience that has an influence on a needed change in human rights policy or practice, and pair a compelling narrative with a clear distribution strategy directed at them. IC makes a direct argument for their approach to storytelling to this audience. As one of their directors noted: ‘Our films weren’t made to be scrutinized by the Guardian’(Jefferson, 2012). IC also advocate that each film must propose a manageable solution. Here’s one of their directors again: ‘There are a lot of good documentaries out there that paint a well-told story about something that’s wrong with the world. But ...They rarely presume to propose an answer; they just beautiful- ly articulate the problem. And we hate that. You’re left going, “Ok, yes, I hate fracking. Now what am I supposed to do about it?”...What we did was paint moral clarity and provide direct action steps’ (ibid). In my own practice at WITNESS we also strongly advocate for providing solutions and enabling the target audience ‘space for action’ as they watch a video – their realistic option to exercise agency should not just be an add-on action at the end of a video but a response that makes sense based on the narrative journey they’ve gone through while engaging with the media (Cizek, 2005). In this context, for example, the admonition to ‘Above all share this movie online’ at the end of Kony 2012 makes perfect action and narrative sense as a response to the framing that has gone before about the power of online action.3 3 See this moment in the YouTube video of Kony 2012: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc&t=29m51s. Review 466 The challenge of course is when a video steps outside its original audience, distribution context or timing. This is something I frequently experience in our work at WITNESS – if you show a video made to be shown for eviden- tiary purposes at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights to an audience of teenagers without a clear explanation of who the original and intended audience was, they will be bemused, and of course vice versa. Consider the puzzled reactions to the apparently Thriller-inspired dance Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article/4/3/463/2189429 by guest on 27 September 2021 spectacular, ‘Invisible Children Global Night Commute Musical’ among people discovering Invisible Children for the first time here in the United States.