Kony's video goes viral

Joseph Kony the Lord Resistance Army is one of the world’s most notorious criminals due to the fact that he has apprehended over 650 children soldiers and sex slaves in the short span of 2 years (Green, 2012). There has even been a release of a video online gaining massive support over the internet concerning the halt of his operations.

Source: highsnobiety.com

Apart from that, Kony2012 is a film created to gain support from authorities by an organization called the Invisible Children who are spearheading this attempt to bring Kony to face international justice for his despicable acts of inhumanity. This short film is about an issue concerning a Uganda national warlord who holds children captive and uses them as slaves and/or soldiers. This video became viral on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in an instant and is because its contents touch sensitive social issues (Cherubini, 2012).

It is understood that this video was made on the grounds of activism and that those social networking sites do not mainly serve as a platform for activism but the internet is able to conjure an orthodox method of activism by adding the current concept campaign through the use of emails (Harlow, 2011). In layman terms, the main purpose social movements such as these is to attract the attention of outstanding public figures thus sparking a movement aimed at the operations of bandits such as Kony.

Source: highsnobiety.com

In this context, the internet played a colossal part in shedding light on the situation to others as this video gained over 14.5 million viewers on YouTube in just a matter of days. Despite having millions of viewers overnight, it is believed that the World Wide Web can never outgun any existing activism through its massive number of viewers (Briggs, 2010).

Based on those statistics and figures, I firmly suggest that online activism can spread like wildfire as more and more people are dependent on the internet for dissemination of information and above all, it is easily accessible. Based on the Kony case above, a proper activism movement in the real world is sparked by video that went viral on the internet. Therefore, the internet also serves as a platform on which millions are gathered before a proactive movement is created (Eichstaedt, 2010). I would like to stance that online distribution of information is arguably the fastest method in creating awareness to the public.


References

1. Green, M, 2012, The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted. Portobello Books. p. 121
2. Cherubini, F, 2012, Kony2012: once information goes viral, there's no stopping it, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, March 9, viewed at 12 June 2012,http://www.editorsweblog.org/2012/03/09/kony2012-once-information-goes-viral-theres-no-stopping-it
3. Harlow, S, 2011. Social media and social movements: Facebook and an online Guatemalan justice movement that moved offline, New Media & Society, vol. 14, np. 2, pp. 224-243.
4. Briggs, J, 2010. Innocents Lost: When Child soldiers Go to war. pp. 105–144.
5. Eichstaedt, P, 2010, First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, p. 206