WITNESS Co-hosts Panel: "Kony 2012" And Lessons Learned For Global Activism

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Panel which took place last week at NYU. Witness on the effectiveness of Kony 2012.


The most viral video of all time, Invisible Children's Kony 2012, intentionally catapulted Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony into the western public's eye. It also provoked a rare public debate about the methods and effects of transnational activism. While supporters celebrated the campaign's viral success, critics questioned its call for a militarized response, its neglect of African voices, and the narratives employed to galvanize western viewers. Please join CHRGJ and WITNESS, as we host a forward-looking discussion about what can be learned from the campaign successes of Kony 2012 and the subsequent global debate.

When: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 | 6-8pm
Where: NYU Law School Furman Hall
Lester Pollack Room | 245 Sullivan St., 9th floor
*Please bring photo ID to be admitted.

The discussion will be followed by a reception.
RSVP requested, space is limited. Email watnea [@] exchange [dot] law [dot] nyu [dot] edu

Speakers include*:

Moderator: Amy Goodman, Executive Producer, Democracy Now
Professor Philip Alston, Faculty Director and Co-chair, CHRGJ; UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions (Aug 2004-July 2010)
;
Fabienne Hara, Vice-President for Multilateral Affairs at International Crisis Group;
Chioke I'Anson , philosopher who specializes in Africana philosophy, postcolonial theory, and humanitarianism;
Chris Michael , WITNESS, video advocacy trainer and human rights advocate.

Victor Ochen, Director of the African Youth Initiative Network, which offers rehabilitation assistance to Ugandan youth affected by the war; LRA war survivor;
Jolly Okot , Country Director for Invisible Children, Uganda

*Speakers are subject to confirmation and may change.

April 17, 2012

New York, NY

Furman Hall, Lester Pollack Room | 245 Sullivan St., 9th floor

Putting one against the other: Witness and Kony 2012's plan of attack

In your opinion, which activism plan is more effective?


Witness.org's?

Or Invisible Children's?

Witness org. promotional video

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Less flashy, more effective: A promotional video for Witness.org, an important website specializing in video activism and putting the cameras in the hands of those that need them.

From Flash To Fizzle (From The New York Times)

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by Brian Stelter

I don't remember how old I was when I first climbed up to the roof of my family's home in suburban Maryland. Eleven, maybe? Twelve? But I do remember what I saw up there. It was the night of the Fourth of July, and it was turning dark enough for the fireworks. 

As I was seated facing south, in the direction of the town closest to me, Damascus, I tried to guess where on the horizon I'd see the first stray green or red or blue shell -- the one that serves as a five-minute warning that the show's about to start. But on this night, I didn't see the first explosion in the sky. I heard it. 

The sound had come from far away, in the direction of a neighboring town, Mount Airy. The fireworks show there had already started, pre-empting my town's. Soon I could see both shows simultaneously, and before long a few families on my street fired off a few shells of their own, and I watched in awe until all I saw in the sky were stars. 

Today, this is what our news culture looks like to consumers: individual bursts of light that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as fast. 

What else can we call a story that generates 100 million views on YouTube in a matter of days, garners outrage among young people across the country and spurs several resolutions in Congress -- and then practically vanishes? 

The YouTube views were for a video produced by Invisible Children, a small nonprofit group that was trying to draw attention to Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, an African guerrilla group that has mounted attacks against civilians for more than 20 years. But his name probably needs no explanation now. ''KONY 2012,'' as the video was dubbed, became an international news sensation in early March, ''rocketing across Twitter and Facebook at a pace rarely seen for any video, let alone a half-hour film about a distant conflict in Central Africa,'' as The New York Times put it in a front-page article on March 9. 

The video succeeded in making Mr. Kony famous, which was the first of the group's stated goals. Maybe a year from now he'll be arrested, as the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has vowed. ''Now we have the citizens of the world pushing for that, and that is helping a lot,'' he told The Associated Press earlier this month. ''It will be the end of the Joseph Kony crimes.''
But in the United States, at least, Mr. Kony is no longer in the news or on Twitter's ever-refreshing list of trending topics. 

Fireworks like ''KONY 2012'' burn more brightly than they would have in the past, but for better or worse, they tend to be extinguished faster than ever, too. Just ask Jeremy Lin, who's no longer a source of ''Linsanity,'' or Karen Handel, who's no longer a top official at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, or Michele Bachmann, no longer a presidential candidate. Or Rick Perry. Or Herman Cain. (If you can remember why they were newsworthy at all.) 

In a few days, ask Hilary Rosen, whose comments about Ann Romney sparked a brief but furious ''mommy war'' last week. 

These flash-in-the-pan episodes have long been evident in the entertainment universe. The breakup of a marriage like Kim Kardashian's or the death of a superstar like Whitney Houston prompts instant heehawing and told-ya-so-ing, and a month later we're hard-pressed to remember that it happened at all. 

But now, the same overreactions happen with political news -- when Sarah Palin hints again at running for president or Rush Limbaugh insults a law student on the radio. 

Except now, instead of asking ''Where were you'' when a news story flashes before us like a firework, we ask, ''Who told you?'' 

Users of social networking Web sites flit from one story to another, attracted by what their friends are saying and what the omnipresent lists of trending topics are stressing. There's a law that might harm the Internet! Click. Beyoncé's having a baby! Click. There's pink slime in our hamburger meat! Click. You can almost hear the shells bursting in the nighttime sky. 

''The news itself has become so ubiquitous, so constant that our eyes only pop out when a really shiny object comes flowing down the river,'' said Jim Bankoff, the head of Vox Media, which operates the sports Web site SB Nation and the technology site The Verge. ''People don't just consume it, they 'like' it, retweet and e-mail it. All this sharing leads to more sharing, which sets off a trend, which sparks more coverage.'' 

Sometimes this can be distracting; sometimes, even suffocating. And yet we seem to gain something from it -- a common online conversation. A common ground. Or at the very least, a currency for jokes. 

AND then, just as suddenly, we switch over to the next big story. 

Google search rankings, video view records and Twitter trending topics tell users when the crowd has moved on. Then the joke becomes: ''Kony who?'' 

Of the 7.1 million page views of Wikipedia's article on Mr. Kony so far this year, 5 million were racked up in the three days when the video was a hot topic online. Now it's viewed fewer than 15,000 times a day. 

Perhaps this flitting from story to story also reflects the sense of accomplishment Web users feel when we think action has been taken against the day's injustice. Certainly, there was celebration online when Netflix reversed itself on its plan to break up streaming and DVD services. And there was celebration among Mr. Limbaugh's critics, too, every time an advertiser distanced itself from his show. 

It may be true when it comes to more serious subjects as well, like Mr. Kony's decades of brutality. Vivian Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News (and a former executive at The New York Times Company) credits some of the intensity of the news cycle to both the access to social media and ''the sense of empowerment that social media has generated.'' 

The February shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old in Sanford, Fla., may have never received national media attention were it not for the initial bursts of Twitter and Facebook buzz. 

The same is probably true of Mr. Kony, who is believed to be in hiding in Central Africa. Two weeks after ''KONY 2012'' was released, I asked a group of 12 students at the University of Memphis how many knew who Mr. Kony was. Eleven students immediately raised their hands -- and then the 12th student meekly raised his hand, too, probably out of fear of being an outcast. Four said they had watched the video in its entirely. Yet none of them had heard anything about Mr. Kony or his army in the days since. 

Some of the students had also heard about another viral video -- this one courtesy of TMZ, showing the Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell pacing a San Diego street, unclothed, in what the media described as a breakdown. It ignited no new burst of Kony coverage, however. Traffic for the ''KONY 2012'' video barely budged. 

The group called its next video ''Part II -- Beyond Famous.'' Released on April 4, the video defended the group against critics and previewed plans for a night of action on April 20. It has been viewed over 1.6 million times -- impressive on its own, but a mere bottle rocket compared to the fireworks a month earlier. The group had its moment -- and now the dazzling flashes of light are elsewhere.

Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits (From The New York Times)

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by David Carr

It’s an important distinction in an age when you can accumulate social currency on Facebook or Twitter just by hitting the “like” or “favorite” button. 

The ongoing referendum on the Web often seems more like a kind of collective digital graffiti than a measure of engagement: I saw this thing, it spoke to me for at least one second, and here is my mark to prove it. 

 

But it gets more complicated when the subjects are more complicated. Hitting the favorite button on the first episode of “Mad Men” is a remarkably different gesture than expressing digital solidarity with kidnapped children in Africa, but it all sort of looks the same at the keyboard. 

In the friction-free atmosphere of the Internet, it costs nothing more than a flick of the mouse to register concern about the casualties of far-flung conflicts. Certainly some people are taking up the causes that come out of the Web’s fire hose, but others are most likely doing no more than burnishing their digital avatars.

In February, the digiterati went bonkers after the Susan G. Komen foundation (shorthanded as #Komen on Twitter) announced it was cutting off financing for Planned Parenthood. And then #KONY2012 started popping up in my Twitter feed and I, along with 100 million others, watched a video about the indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony. 

After weeks of remaining under the radar, #TrayvonMartin began to surface as well, with many suggesting that the people who got so frantic about the victimization of young black males on another continent needed to look closer to home, at the death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida. 

As a reporter, I don’t sign up for various causes, but as someone who lives — far too much — in the world of social media, I can feel the pull of digital activism. And I have to admit I’m starting to experience a kind of “favoriting” fatigue — meaning that the digital causes of the day or week are all starting to blend together. Another week, another hashtag, and with it, a question about what is actually being accomplished. 

 

I ended up thinking a lot about the power and limits of digital activism earlier this month when I was in Moscow during the Russian presidential vote. I spent election night with Aleksei Navalny, a Russian blogger who had become a tip of the spear in the social media campaign against the current government. On that night, camera crews from around the world swirled around him and it seemed as if anything was possible.

But by the next day, it was clear that Vladimir V. Putin would retain his grip on power, and Mr. Navalny ended up posting on Twitter from police custody when he was arrested after an opposition rally. Social media activism may prove to be a durable force in Russian politics, but in these early days it is no match for offline might. 

Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” is not entirely dismissive of the Web as a political organizing tool, but is skeptical of the motives, and power, of digital activism. 

“My hunch is that people often affiliate with causes online for selfish and narcissistic purposes,” he said. “Sometimes, it may be as simple as trying to impress their online friends, and once you have fashioned that identity, there is very little reason to actually do anything else.” 

Which brings us to the online campaign denouncing the fact that “Bully,” a movie about child-on-child harassment and violence to be released Friday, has received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board. 

I have watched the evocative trailer for the movie and met the director, Lee Hirsch. And as a parent of a 15-year-old, I have skin in the game. 

On Thursday, word came that David Boies and Ted Olson, the attorneys who were on the opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, had joined the effort to persuade the motion picture association to change the film’s R rating to PG-13, so that the young people most affected by the issue could actually see the movie. Celebrities and politicians, everyone from Drew Brees to Justin Bieber, have weighed in, as have more than 460,000 people who’ve signed an online petition demanding that the rating be changed.

The petition was started by a teenager, Katy Butler, who was bullied for being a lesbian, and has blown up huge on Twitter and elsewhere. 

“We were absolutely disappointed with the rating,” Mr. Hirsch told me Friday. “This film has been heralded and welcomed by all kinds of education groups, and multiple school districts were planning to take their students en masse.” 

Mr. Hirsch said the petition came out of nowhere. “I got an e-mail the day after it started and I have watched it rising since,” he said. 

Generally the way people express support for a film is by paying for a ticket. If “Bully” were seen only by the people who signed the petition, it would have a domestic gross of about $5 million. “Food Inc.,” “Inside Job” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” all major documentaries that landed with significant impact, never made it to the $5 million mark. 

There’s another thing to wonder about. The film is distributed by Harvey Weinstein’s company — who I can say without irony is one of the most talented bullies in any business — and what seems like a blossoming of netroots has obvious commercial value to the Weinstein Company. It would not be the first time a distributor happily courted controversy to call attention to a film. 

I called Christopher J. Dodd, the former senator who now runs the motion picture association and who was on the receiving end of a full-fledged Web revolt after his organization’s support of unpopular piracy legislation in January. I expected him to suggest that all the online petitioners had failed to grasp the nuance and importance of the ratings system. Not so. 

“These are our customers and it behooves us to listen to them,” he said. “We had a screening in Washington and among others we had Katy Butler, who started the petition, and she got up and spoke. I commended her for what she had done.” 

“This is the world we are going to live in as far as I can see into the future, and we need to be part of that conversation instead of wringing our hands,” Mr. Dodd said. 

Mr. Dodd said he and Mr. Weinstein had been in steady and earnest communication, and that he believes that some sort of compromise on the content of the film will be reached so that young people who wish to can see the film together — as they should — without having to hold hands with or seek permission from their parents. 

That outcome — a very traditional organization responding with an open mind to a netroots outcry — made me think again about my own cynicism about Web activism. Many of the folks who made the unpopular decision at Komen are gone and the policy has been amended. Trayvon Martin’s death is under investigation and the president is now weighing in directly. And who knows, perhaps the Web-enabled sunlight on Joseph Kony will end with him being brought to justice, finally. 

Sure, hashtags come and go, and the so-called weak ties of digital movements are no match for real world engagement. But they are not only better than nothing, they probably make the world, the one beyond the keyboard, a better place. 

College Campus Kony Pride?

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by Katherine Curtis

When 250 St. Thomas students RSVPed to the “Kony 2012 Cover The Night” event, organizers were anticipating a large turnout.

But even with all the hype surrounding the Kony 2012 movement, less than 20 people showed up to post flyers around campus.

The lack of participation may have been because the event took place on Friday night or because it conflicted with three other major events on campus: the Relay for Life, Breaking the Silence and Ebony Open Mic Night.

But the momentum behind the movement has declined since the 30-minute video first debuted online.
“I feel like the marketing didn’t really match up with what they were asking or what the cause was,” senior Nataly Sanchez said. “They didn’t really do anything. I feel like it’s a good concept, but I feel like it’s a scam concept to be honest.”

Part of the decline in the Kony 2012 campaign is due to public speculation of Invisible Children’s business practices, particularly the percentage of funds put toward direct services.

“I don’t associate with Invisible Children through my actions,” junior James Wheeler said. “I don’t necessarily agree with everything they do outside of the Kony movement. I’ve just done my research on websites, and I know that there are better organizations.”

Invisible Children’s co-founder Jason Russell’s public disturbance in March also played a role in the movement’s decline. According to the Huffington Post, a “brief reactive psychosis” brought on Russell’s meltdown, and he was detained after being caught in a San Diego neighborhood in his underwear, yelling and disrupting traffic.

Despite the negative publicity surrounding the organization, participating students went forward and covered the John Roach Center and Aquinas Hall with Kony posters.

“I think it starts small, and we raise awareness here,” said junior Sara Nordstrom, St.Thomas ‘Cover the Night’ representative. “Then maybe some students walking by will say, ‘Oh, who’s that? What’s that?’ and try and raise awareness themselves and maybe take on a more active role and contact policy-makers.”

Though there may be aspects of the organization that students distrust, Nordstrom said people should not overlook the greater good the campaign is attempting to bring.

“I just think it’s a great opportunity for students to come together as a community and work toward something that they believe in and they want to make a change,” Nordstrom said.

Katherine Curtis can be reached at curt1354@stthomas.edu.

KONY 2012: What's Next (From Invisible Children)

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The UN, June, Unite (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Dance To The Catchy Music)?!