Re: [change] Kony 2012
Of course not, but that's never been the reality. The truth is neither here nor there. Relevant people have been discussing and taking action on Kony for a long time now. The US has committed troops to capturing him, the relevant countries have his capture as a primary objective. That you presume these things aren't true is part of what's wrong with this approach to storytelling. This article is a good analysis from that standpoint; better than I could formulate: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking-kony-2012/ What I'm not convinced of is that a bunch of people hitting "Retweet" on questionably accurate agitprop from a shady charity is a positive social outcome. Even presuming that awareness is itself a valuable goal (a standpoint I'm not convinced of), I feel like what's happening with this "movement" is even a lower standard of awareness than we're used to. The campaign itself basically validates the belief in the viewer that all they have to do is link their friends to the video, and voilà, they've contributed social good. The probability that they then go do anything actually useful at all afterwards seems even lower to me than with other, older awareness campaigns I've witnessed or participated in. The best thing to have come out of this all in my mind is how well the counterargument has spread along with the video. Most Twitter celebs I see RT the video, then also RT the visiblechildren critique when it's brought to their attention. This is a good thing. The Internet is usually not this considerate to contrarian points of view. -Clint On Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 7:17 PM, Abhishek Bhardwaj wrote:
Would you rather that people not know it at all ? That there is no discussion about it ?
I bet you for the first time in years people are genuinely taking an interest in Africa , everything starts from awareness.
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 9:04 PM, Clint Tseng <cxlt@cs.washington.edu (mailto:cxlt@cs.washington.edu)> wrote:
You're presuming that getting people "excited" is a valuable goal in and of itself, regardless of the means. What's the gain?
-Clint
On Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Varun Arora wrote:
I respect what all of you are saying in terms of critique - but there is no way on earth he (the movie maker) would have been able to get people so excited and energetic in 30 minutes if he had cared only to be developmentally and logically and theoretically and politically correct. That doesn't resonate with youth who are too lost in their social media lives. They need quick, invigorating, actionable, triggered media on their face to feel provoked. I felt provoked. There is a reason why UN supported documentaries are not shared by every other teenager over 3 days on a viral social network - they struggle to be compelling, and are terrible story tellers. I highly doubt the folks at Invisible Children are not aware about the implications of their approach. They tried to tell a good story here - and they did an excellent job at it. And the fact that we are having these discussions on an important listserv is a blessing in disguise; we are learning more about policy implications of international peace efforts, than we would have ever cared to learn about had we not heard of Kony.
I am an entrepreneur myself, and know how when you sell stuff, even if it is a social product and if it's going to challenge the Solow model of growth, it doesn't matter: you got to put it in lay man terms (sometimes very embarrassing) and over simplify what you are doing and offering. And often end up taking a completely different politically incorrect (not wrong, though) approach to resonate with your audiences. None of our research evidence and learnings are ever useful to any partner or investor or customer. None of our proven theories on economic development are even looked at. The only people who question you about that are people at conferences and classrooms; we are living in bubbles, and if we cannot learn to communicate important and proven theoretical ideas in crisp and pervasive media, we will be left behind.
Varun
On 03/08/2012 08:04 PM, Abraham D. Flaxman wrote:
to make this critique a slogan, "Know Why 2012"
Sent from phone
----- Reply message ----- From: "Amer Dahmash" <adahmash@gmail.com> (mailto:adahmash@gmail.com) Date: Thu, Mar 8, 2012 4:27 pm Subject: [change] Kony 2012 To: "Yaw Anokwa" <yanokwa@gmail.com> (mailto:yanokwa@gmail.com) Cc: "Change Group" <change@change.washington.edu> (mailto:change@change.washington.edu)
I think the Invisible Children response is great but I feel that it fails to address one of the biggest problems with their campaign which one of my friends captured by referencing Paulo Freire's theory of False Generosity:
"When a system is structured so that there are oppressors and oppressed, some of the oppressor class feel genuine compassion toward the suffering of the oppressed. They move to isolate that suffering and to aid it, not to address the structures of society which are the root causes. Thus, to the extent that they relieve any suffering they do so by hiding from themselves the genuine causes, their own privilege as oppressor class members."
An over-simplification perhaps but that's what the Kony 2012 campaign smacks of to me. -amer
On Mar 8, 2012, at 3:56 PM, Yaw Anokwa wrote:
Invisible Children has written a response at http://s3.amazonaws.com/www.invisiblechildren.com/critiques.html
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18954353409/not-alone has links to other critiques.
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 19:32, Yaw Anokwa <yanokwa@gmail.com> (mailto:yanokwa@gmail.com) wrote:
You may have heard about Kony 2012. It is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make "Joseph Kony (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kony) famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice." The film is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.
While almost everyone agrees that Joseph Kony is a bad person, Invisible Children has been criticized for their approach. Grant Oyston lays out some of those arguments against Kony 2012 at http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble. The follow on posts are also informative.
The spread of the Kony meme, both for and against, has been possible only because of social media. In that sense, it's quite relevant to those of us interested in leveraging technology for change...
Yaw
change mailing list change@change.washington.edu (mailto:change@change.washington.edu) http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
_______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu (mailto:change@change.washington.edu) http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change _______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu (mailto:change@change.washington.edu) http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change -- Varun Arora Information Systems Management | Class of 2012 Carnegie Mellon University Mobile/Cell: +1-412-478-2164 (tel:%2B1-412-478-2164) varora@andrew.cmu.edu (mailto:varora@andrew.cmu.edu) http://www.varunarora.com
_______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu (mailto:change@change.washington.edu) http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
_______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu (mailto:change@change.washington.edu) http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
-- Regards, Abhishek Bhardwaj
Hi Change community! Though I'm not based at UW, I have learned so much from your posts and appreciate this virtual network and discourse. (in brief I work on an mHealth evaluation w/ the world bank in ethiopia) I wrote a response to Kony2012 that touches upon many of the points that Yaw, Amer, Varun, Abhishek, Clint, and Abraham raised: http://everydayambassador.org/2012/03/10/kony-as-a-catalyst/ The focus of my site/book, philosophically, is encouraging people to use tech/social media to become closer to people far away, not end up farther away from the people right around us. You'll see why I think Kony2012 is too much of the latter (and hence I don't endorse it), but I'm really happy that it happened... All my best, Kate On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 10:32 PM, Clint Tseng <cxlt@cs.washington.edu> wrote:
Of course not, but that's never been the reality. The truth is neither here nor there.
Relevant people have been discussing and taking action on Kony for a long time now. The US has committed troops to capturing him, the relevant countries have his capture as a primary objective. That you presume these things aren't true is part of what's wrong with this approach to storytelling.
This article is a good analysis from that standpoint; better than I could formulate: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking-kony-2012/
What I'm not convinced of is that a bunch of people hitting "Retweet" on questionably accurate agitprop from a shady charity is a positive social outcome. Even presuming that awareness is itself a valuable goal (a standpoint I'm not convinced of), I feel like what's happening with this "movement" is even a lower standard of awareness than we're used to. The campaign itself basically validates the belief in the viewer that all they have to do is link their friends to the video, and voilà, they've contributed social good. The probability that they then go do anything actually useful at all afterwards seems even lower to me than with other, older awareness campaigns I've witnessed or participated in.
The best thing to have come out of this all in my mind is how well the counterargument has spread along with the video. Most Twitter celebs I see RT the video, then also RT the visiblechildren critique when it's brought to their attention. This is a good thing. The Internet is usually not this considerate to contrarian points of view.
-Clint
On Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 7:17 PM, Abhishek Bhardwaj wrote:
Would you rather that people not know it at all ? That there is no discussion about it ?
I bet you for the first time in years people are genuinely taking an interest in Africa , everything starts from awareness.
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 9:04 PM, Clint Tseng <cxlt@cs.washington.edu>wrote:
You're presuming that getting people "excited" is a valuable goal in and of itself, regardless of the means. What's the gain?
-Clint
On Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Varun Arora wrote:
I respect what all of you are saying in terms of critique - but there is no way on earth he (the movie maker) would have been able to get people so excited and energetic in 30 minutes if he had cared only to be developmentally and logically and theoretically and politically correct. That doesn't resonate with youth who are too lost in their social media lives. They need quick, invigorating, actionable, triggered media on their face to feel provoked. I felt provoked. There is a reason why UN supported documentaries are not shared by every other teenager over 3 days on a viral social network - they struggle to be compelling, and are terrible story tellers. I highly doubt the folks at Invisible Children are not aware about the implications of their approach. They tried to tell a good story here - and they did an excellent job at it. And the fact that we are having these discussions on an important listserv is a blessing in disguise; we are learning more about policy implications of international peace efforts, than we would have ever cared to learn about had we not heard of Kony.
I am an entrepreneur myself, and know how when you sell stuff, even if it is a social product and if it's going to challenge the Solow model of growth, it doesn't matter: you got to put it in lay man terms (sometimes very embarrassing) and over simplify what you are doing and offering. And often end up taking a completely different politically incorrect (not wrong, though) approach to resonate with your audiences. None of our research evidence and learnings are ever useful to any partner or investor or customer. None of our proven theories on economic development are even looked at. The only people who question you about that are people at conferences and classrooms; we are living in bubbles, and if we cannot learn to communicate important and proven theoretical ideas in crisp and pervasive media, we will be left behind.
Varun
On 03/08/2012 08:04 PM, Abraham D. Flaxman wrote:
to make this critique a slogan, "Know Why 2012"
Sent from phone
----- Reply message ----- From: "Amer Dahmash" <adahmash@gmail.com> <adahmash@gmail.com> Date: Thu, Mar 8, 2012 4:27 pm Subject: [change] Kony 2012 To: "Yaw Anokwa" <yanokwa@gmail.com> <yanokwa@gmail.com> Cc: "Change Group" <change@change.washington.edu><change@change.washington.edu>
I think the Invisible Children response is great but I feel that it fails to address one of the biggest problems with their campaign which one of my friends captured by referencing Paulo Freire's theory of False Generosity:
"When a system is structured so that there are oppressors and oppressed, some of the oppressor class feel genuine compassion toward the suffering of the oppressed. They move to isolate that suffering and to aid it, not to address the structures of society which are the root causes. Thus, to the extent that they relieve any suffering they do so by hiding from themselves the genuine causes, their own privilege as oppressor class members."
An over-simplification perhaps but that's what the Kony 2012 campaign smacks of to me. -amer
On Mar 8, 2012, at 3:56 PM, Yaw Anokwa wrote:
Invisible Children has written a response at http://s3.amazonaws.com/www.invisiblechildren.com/critiques.html
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18954353409/not-alone has links to other critiques.
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 19:32, Yaw Anokwa <yanokwa@gmail.com><yanokwa@gmail.com>wrote:
You may have heard about Kony 2012. It is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make "Joseph Kony (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kony) famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice." The film is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.
While almost everyone agrees that Joseph Kony is a bad person, Invisible Children has been criticized for their approach. Grant Oyston lays out some of those arguments against Kony 2012 at http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble. The follow on posts are also informative.
The spread of the Kony meme, both for and against, has been possible only because of social media. In that sense, it's quite relevant to those of us interested in leveraging technology for change...
Yaw
change mailing list change@change.washington.edu http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
_______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
_______________________________________________ change mailing listchange@change.washington.eduhttp://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
--
* Varun Arora Information Systems Management | Class of 2012 Carnegie Mellon University*
Mobile/Cell: +1-412-478-2164 varora@andrew.cmu.edu http://www.varunarora.com [image: Carnegie Mellon University] _______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
_______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
-- Regards, Abhishek Bhardwaj
_______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
-- Kate Otto web: everyday ambassador <http://everydayambassador.org/about/> mobile: +1.401.692.9327 skype: katherineelaine follow: @kateotto
participants (2)
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Clint Tseng
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Kate Otto