Kony 2012 Through a Prism of Video Advocacy Practices and Trends
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Kony 2012 Through a Prism of Video
Advocacy Practices and Trends
SAM GREGORY*
sam@witness.org
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
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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
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
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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
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
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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
spectacular, ‘Invisible Children Global Night Commute Musical’ among
people discovering Invisible Children for the first time here in the United
States. More seriously, look at the puzzled, angry reception of Kony 2012 in
at least one screening in Northern Uganda (Ochen, 2012).
Moving to ‘Drillability’ Alongside Spreadability
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Elsewhere I have blogged (Gregory, 2012) about some possible ways in
which this audience-driven, singular narrative storytelling frame can be
reconciled with questions of over-simplification, and the ethics of representa-
tion, and additional reference points exist in this Journal’s own discussion of
‘Responsibility to the Story’ (Gready, 2010; see also Gregory, 2010).
One notable choice point would be to provide greater options for viewers
to find complexity in a particular situation and to purposefully challenge the
dominance of the ‘single story’. This is a notion that in transmedia discus-
sions has been described in terms of ‘drillability’ (Jenkins, 2009; Mittel,
2009) alongside (or in oppositionality all too often) to the spreadability that
is hoped for from videos that gain viral attention online. Just as much as a
campaign is ‘spreadable’, it can also be ‘drillable’ (meaning that a person can
dig down and understand easily beyond the core message and narrative) and
have a depth of voice and context. Lana Swartz (2012) analyses this tension
in IC’s work pre-Kony 2012, noting some areas where IC has paid particular
attention to drillability and others where it has either directly or indirectly
hampered drillability (for example in relation to the stories of its Ugandan
co-leaders).
Drillability on the Kony story and IC happened organically in the days and
weeks following the release of Kony 2012 as the slipstream of attention pro-
vided for amplification of individual bloggers like Rosebell Kagumire, whose
video (2012) presenting alternative viewpoints on the LRA situation has
been viewed over 600,000 times, as well as more organized efforts like the
Al-Jazeera satellite television channel’s promotion of Ugandan voices via its
#UgandaSpeaks campaign. This is an option that is increasingly enabled by
the diversity and depth of citizen media and social media that can present
diverse and distinct voices on particular human rights issues, and in the case
of Kony 2012 could represent the voice and agency of the hundreds and
thousands of Ugandans living with the legacy of the LRA, or advocating and
mobilizing to confront that legacy, as well as the voices of people living with
the threat of LRA violence now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,467 Review
Central African Republic and Southern Sudan. Moving forward, it is to be
hoped that future Kony 2012s will strive to incorporate more intentional
drillability alongside their powerful spreadability.
References
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of Commodity Activism. In R. Mukherjee, and S. Banet-Wieser (eds). Commodity
Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times. New York University Press:
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