Kony 2012 became emblematic of a larger debate concerning attention-driven activism. In a blog post written in Kony 2012’s immediate aftermath, Ethan Zuckerman (2012a) surveys the critiques leveled against the video, stressing that it gained broad and rapid circulation by grossly oversimplifying the complexities of the conditions in Africa and creating heroic roles for Western activists while denying the agency of Africans working to change their own circumstances. Zuckerman explained: “I’m starting to wonder if this [exemplifies] a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?” This question haunts not only IC supporters, but leaders of many other activist groups.
By the time Kony 2012 hit, our team at USC had been studying Invisible Children for three years. We first learned about IC through one of its early, and still controversial, media artifacts, a short dance film entitled Invisible Children Musical (2006), which was a takeoff of Disney’s High School Musical. In this film, IC’s founders turned to popular culture, song, and dance to reach and inspire young people to take part in the Global Night Commute, a multisited live event. The Invisible Children Musical polarized our research group when we watched it during our weekly meeting. Some members were intrigued, even excited, by its unabashed appropriation of popular culture. Others literally pushed themselves away from the conference table to express their negative reaction to the film’s extravagantly celebratory and admittedly simplistic messaging.
As we learned more about the organization’s media and activities, we quickly understood that pushing the boundaries of youth activism was an integral, though not always completely intentional, part of IC’s efforts. Through a series of research projects focused on various facets of IC—including learning, transmedia storytelling, and performativity—we delved deeper into understanding the group’s media, staff, and supporters. Over the years, we observed many IC events in Southern California. We attended film screenings and watched many hours of IC media. We were invited to attend events that the group organized and visited its headquarters in San Diego many times. We interviewed 45 young people involved with IC and had regular interactions with the group’s leadership.
Our ongoing contact gave us a unique vantage point from which to observe IC as it moved from a relatively obscure initiative to an extremely visible (and overly scrutinized) organization that was asked to publicly account for all its decisions. We were also privy to the profound personal and organizational challenges IC faced as the situation around Kony 2012 escalated. And, we were part of a small group of researchers IC continued to trust after 2012. As one staff member observed in 2013, Kony 2012 had forced IC to “grow up” overnight; we were able to observe this change firsthand.
Nick Couldry (2010) begins his book Why Voice Matters by identifying the many different ways voices get denied or undermined within today’s neoliberal society. IC’s supporters were mostly drawn from the ranks of more affluent and politically influential sectors of society (see Karlin et al. forthcoming.) Surely, these youth have access to many of the levers (Zuckerman 2013a) needed to make their voices heard. Yet many of them had not been involved in civic life before and would not have become politically active without IC’s supportive community. In this book’s later chapters, we will see more dramatic examples of marginalized groups seeking collective power through participatory politics, but it’s worth stressing that political engagement is not guaranteed even among those who come from more privileged backgrounds. Supporting this perspective, Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson (forthcoming) show how memes critical of Kony 2012 exploited stereotypes that young people are ignorant, irrational, duped, or apathetic. Couldry (2010) reminds us, “People’s voices only count if their bodies matter,” noting that existing forms of discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, and so forth ensure that some voices go unheard (130), and we must surely add to that list the marginalization which has historically occurred as children and youth first assert themselves into political debates. Couldry also reminds us that “an unequal distribution of narrative resources” may also serve to limit which voices can be heard, since some forms of political speech are more readily recognized than others within institutional politics or journalism (9). The groups we are studying are seeking to expand the languages through which politics can be expressed, finding new vocabularies that make sense in the life contexts of young citizens; as they do so, however, they may often express their messages in ways that make them less likely to be heard by key decision makers.
In this chapter, we use IC and Kony 2012 to explore the potentials and challenges of participatory politics. Three years after the film’s release, we remain distinctly ambivalent about whether the film’s immense spreadability translated into a net success for the organization and the youth movement it inspired. We thus use IC and Kony 2012 to identify some of the paradoxes that must be addressed if we are going to understand whether and in what ways the mechanisms of participatory politics might promote meaningful political change and foster greater civic engagement. The paradoxes we identify here reflect recurring questions the organization faced during this period of crisis and success: How much should IC focus on expanding the youth movement it had built up through the years via its focused anti-LRA efforts? Could IC accept its members’ desire for a more participatory organizational model or should it try to retain control over their messaging? Could the story IC told be both simple enough to be easily graspable and complex enough to do justice to the nuances of the LRA conflict? How could IC make its humanitarian and social justice work fun without compromising its acceptance by policy makers and NGOs? And why didn’t IC work harder to balance the friendship and cordiality it so treasured with training that equipped its supporters to deal with contentious situations related to its cause? Above all, should this innovative organization be judged based on the results it achieved in pursuit of its policy goals or based on the ways it recruited and empowered a generation of young activists who might have an impact on a broader range of issues?
We watched IC’s leaders and supporters twist and turn as they experimented with different responses to these core paradoxes; we saw the group move between models that were more top-down or goal focused and others that were more participatory and process focused. The enormous success of Kony 2012 brought all of these tensions to a crisis point from which the organization never fully recovered. Each of the groups in our other case studies confront some of these same tensions; each represents a somewhat different model for how successful organizations might solicit and support the participation of their members in an age of networked communication; each group made its own choices, and, yes, its own mistakes, as they sought to address these defining challenges around civic culture in the early 21st century. Few of the cases, though, illustrate these paradoxes as fully as IC does and that’s why we are starting here.
Moving beyond the Clicktivism Critique
On August 8, 2013, Jason Russell addressed an auditorium full of young IC supporters. After some initial lighthearted comments, his demeanor changed. “I want to give you a little glimpse into what was going on inside of me,” he said. He then recounted the days following Kony 2012’s release that led up to his public mental breakdown. “I wrote down all the things that we were pissing off, that we were disrupting, that we were questioning,” he recalled. “The list looked like this: Hollywood, social networking, online media, movies, activism, United Nations, America, millennials, journalism, nonprofits, fashion, advertising, and international justice.” He explained that’s when he realized “why they’re so pissed off.” In his words, it was “because it’s … the whole world that is going, ‘Who is this? Who are you? How dare you load a 29-minute 59-second video online? And how dare you reach 120 million people in five days? That’s not allowed. Something