critiques simplify our understanding of the political life of American youth. Right now, young people are significantly more likely to participate in cultural activities than engage with institutional politics. As a consequence, those activist groups that have been most successful at helping youth find their civic voice often tap into participants’ interests in popular and participatory cultures, frequently blurring the distinction between what Mizuko Ito and her colleagues (Ito et al. 2009) categorized as friendship-driven and interest-driven modes of participation online. Ito et al. define friendship-driven modes as “dominant and mainstream practices of youth as they go about their day-to-day negotiations with friends and peers” (15). Such friendship-driven networks are often a “primary source of affiliation, friendship, and romantic partners” for youth. In contrast, interest-driven practices are rooted in “specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities.” Ito et al. clarify that the interest-driven activities often reside within the “domain of the geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks” (16). Kahne, Lee, and Feezell (2011) closed the circle between interest-driven activities and civic engagement when they examined how young people’s interest-driven online activities may “serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and, at times, political life” (15) and found a correlation between young people’s interest-driven participation online and increased civic behavior, including volunteering, group membership, and political expression.
Our research found significant overlap between friendship and interest-driven engagement among IC participants. In their analysis of IC interviews, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and her colleagues (2012) identified “shared media experiences” (gathering around texts that have a shared resonance), sense of community (identifying with a collective or network), and a wish to help (a desire to achieve positive change) as three key components of participants’ IC experiences. For a vast majority of the youth interviewed, all three components intersected with their “friendships” and “interests” as they chose to take action with their friends around issues they cared about. Ruth, who was an intern at IC’s offices in 2010, described her experience: “Invisible Children is a lot about relationships.… You work together, you play together, you eat together.” To Janelle, another intern, this approach results in a “complete great intertwining” of work and fun at IC, making it hard to separate the two. Like Ruth and Janelle, many other IC supporters felt that the group’s social elements were crucial to their sustained participation.
Similarly, many interviewees felt that “shared media experiences” significantly contributed to this sense of connection between IC youth. Melissa Brough (2012) traced the early history and tactics of Invisible Children, stressing that the group has long placed a high priority on media production as a means of creating awareness but also recruiting and training a movement of American young people determined to impact human rights concerns in Africa. Jason Russell and Bobby Bailey, recent graduates of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, along with Lauren Poole, who was enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, established Invisible Children in 2006 as an outgrowth of their documentary film Invisible Children: Rough Cut (2006), which called for the capture of Joseph Kony and fundraised for on-the-ground recovery efforts. The organization grew rapidly: Brough recounts that within six years, they had built an organization with 90 staff on the ground in Uganda running development programs, 30 paid U.S. staff managing outreach, a fundraising apparatus that brought in almost $32 million in 2012, and a network of more than 2,000 clubs in schools and churches. The group’s commitment of more than 9 percent of its budget to media making and another 35 percent to mobilization of youth in the United States became yet another site of controversy as Kony 2012 brought new scrutiny of the organization. Lana Swartz (2012) has similarly noted the diverse range of different media practices the group deploys:
“The Movement,” as Invisible Children calls its U.S.-facing work, includes visually arresting films, spectacular event-oriented campaigns, provocative graphic t-shirts and other apparel, music mixes, print media, blogs and more. To be a member of Invisible Children means to be a viewer, participant, wearer, reader, listener, commenter of and in the various activities, many mediated, that make up the Movement. It is a massive, open-ended, evolving documentary “story” unfurling across an expanding number of media forms.
Brian explained in an interview how IC’s media moves people to action: “There is just no way that if you have a beating heart and a pulse in you, that you can watch any of their films and not be moved into action afterwards.… [T]here is always something that resonates within you, just, wow, this is powerful.” IC youth we met were proud of the group’s media, which they saw as central tools in spreading its message.
Spreading Kony 2012
There has been a tendency to deal with Kony 2012 in isolation from the much longer history of IC efforts to rally public opinion against the African warlord. By the time IC released Kony 2012, the group had produced and circulated ten previous features and many shorts; helped get legislation passed in 2010; formed local clubs through high schools, colleges, and churches; recruited and trained thousands of young activists through intern programs, summer camps, and conventions; demonstrated the capacity to mobilize those supporters through local gatherings and demonstrations across the country; developed a large-scale operation on the ground in Africa and brought Ugandans to the United States to interface with American recruits; set up a Ugandan and American teacher exchange program; and run national conventions designed to train young activists so that they could explain what was happening in their own words. Kony 2012 did not simply “go viral” out of the blue; rather, IC had sustained a community and tested strategies of grassroots circulation that reached diverse participants and laid the groundwork for the film’s extraordinarily rapid dissemination.
Supported both through top-down distribution efforts and bottom-up, peer-driven media circulation, the film’s release relied on what Jenkins et al. (2013) call “spreadability” or an “emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways” (3). As we think about this spread of Kony 2012, we might consider different moments of participation as an alternative to the clicktivism model.
A core group of young supporters who had been recruited and trained over many years through clubs at churches, schools, and colleges took the first steps in sharing the film with their peers. The video then circulated via friends, families, and others within their social networks. Gilad Lotan (2012), a researcher for Social Flow, discovered that the earliest and most active retweeters of Kony 2012 came from midsized cities in the Bible Belt and Middle America (including Birmingham, Indianapolis, Dayton, Oklahoma City, and Pittsburgh), cities where there were already many active IC chapters. He also discovered, looking at the personal profiles of those early supporters, that many of them displayed signs of strong religious commitments, as well strong ties to their former (or current) high schools and colleges. Part of the group’s tactics involved getting fans to target high-profile policy makers and “culture makers,” often celebrities known to have strong online followings, in hopes that they would retweet and thus further amplify the message, precipitating greater coverage through mainstream media outlets. Finally, the video provoked responses from concerned others including critics in public policy centers in the United States, critics from the global South who also use digital media to engage within political debates across geographic distances, and other young people who challenged their friends’ grasp of what they were circulating.
A visualization created by Gilad Lotan mapped the initial spread of the Kony 2012 film.
Each of these sets of participants had a different relationship to the organization and its message. As the video traveled outward from the initial cadre of hardcore supporters, there was a greater risk of what danah boyd (2014) calls “context collapse.” For the hardcore supporters, Kony 2012 was understood in relation to the larger IC story: for example, while critics saw something
