Jour 4460 Blog 8: "Make Kony Famous"

The past few days the Make Kony Famous movement has taken over social media. The Invisible Children organization initiated this movement with a very well done video that went viral.

 For those who don’t know about Joseph Kony or Invisible Children here’s some background. Joseph Kony is a rebel leader in Uganda. His army is made up of children that were kidnapped from their homes by others already forced in the army. These children are forced to fight or they are killed. If they try to run away, they are killed. They are forced to kill their own parents. Not all the children fight. The girls who are kidnapped are turned into sex slaves. Kony doesn’t lead this army for a cause.

Kony has been number one on “the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, sexual slavery and abusing children,” according to a post on the Wall Street Journal website. Kony’s campaign has gone on for “26 years,” says Hilary Whitman on cnn.com. The viral video describes the reason for this long reign is because no one can find Kony in the bush.

Three filmmakers created Invisible Children. After they went on a trip to Uganda, found out about the war and interviewed some former child soldiers who escaped the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA.) The goal of Invisible Children is to have Kony arrested and brought to justice on his crimes.

I’ve heard about the Invisible Children organization and their campaigns, like “Light the Night,” before, but none had an impact like this new campaign. This campaign has turned into a movement.

The video was posted March 5, 2012 has been retweeted and shared on Facebook countless times. As of 3:13 p.m. on March 9, it had 57,733,541 views on YouTube. My Twitter timeline on March 5 was flooded with the “#StopKony” trending topic.

The video does an excellent job of describing the background of Kony’s war, how and why Invisible Children was formed and how this new campaign for Kony’s arrest will work. It tells whose already getting involved and how you can get involved. It also has a social media feel within the video using the new Facebook profile style to maneuver through topics.

The incredibly short time that it took the video to spread across the Internet is proof of how powerful a social media campaign can be. While I’m sure it took a nice chunk of change to make the video, distributing it was virtually free.

This campaign was amazing to watch on my Twitter and Facebook timelines. I hop the passion that’s fueling it continues, but I wonder how the organization is going to keep it going since our attention spans are about as long as a grain of rice. Also, I want to know how many people actually got involved and bought the Action Kit or donated some money, and how many just reposted the video. Maybe we’ll see Invisible Children in the news again in April. April 20^th is when Invisible Children volunteers are supposed to cover their cities with “Kony 2012” posters.