video, including the inclusion of a substantial number of African voices, was more fully developed in other videos the organization had produced. Tony (2011), for instance, the film IC released prior to Kony 2012, focused specifically on the long-term relationships the group’s founders had developed with Ugandan youth and auto-critiqued the culturally naive blunders they had made along the way.
IC’s deployment of social media as a channel for circulating Kony 2012 allowed it to gain much greater visibility than if the nonprofit had been forced to rely exclusively on broadcast media, whether through public service announcements or “earned” media coverage. Yet at the same time, this strategy meant that the group could not fully control where or how the video spread. IC underestimated what Lissa Soep (2012) has described as the “digital afterlife” of the film, in which “the original intentions of media producers are reinterpreted, remixed and sometimes distorted by users and emerge into a recontextualized form” (94). This is a problem encountered by many groups that have sought to deploy such practices. One could argue that even the pushback from African political leaders and commentators reflected the new openness that could be achieved in a system where there was more grassroots control over the means of production and circulation; a traditional public service announcement might never have been seen by these Africa-based critics and, similarly, American supporters of Kony 2012 would never have heard these critiques in a more localized media ecology.
Kony 2012 is now often held up as the extreme example of a message that was widely circulated, but which did not result in meaningful change. More than three years after the film, Joseph Kony remains at large, a fact that is often cited as the ultimate proof of Kony 2012’s failure. Some of IC’s critics also find evidence for the meaninglessness of the film’s popularity in the subsequent Cover the Night initiative, which asked young people to hang Kony 2012 posters in their neighborhoods on April 20, a little more than a month after the film’s release. Writing for Policy Mic, Shanoor Servai (2012) called Cover the Night “the anti-climax to the online brawl” over Kony 2012. To her (as to others), Cover the Night proved that a “movement that begins without face-to-face contact between its supporters is unsustainable.” While they certainly raise some valid points, these critics fail to acknowledge the turmoil into which the controversy surrounding Kony 2012 threw IC’s staff and supporters—undermining their ability to make the most of the film’s extraordinary reception—not to mention the extensive work the organization has nonetheless done to move online contacts into more extended face-to-face interactions among participants. More than that, such critiques ignore the actual policy changes the organization was able to achieve. Kony 2012 and IC directly contributed to the bipartisan passage of an expansion to the federal Rewards for Justice program, authorizing a reward of up to $5 million for information “that leads to the arrest of Joseph Kony.” Indeed, IC leadership was invited to the White House ceremony where President Obama signed the bill into law. Despite such policy accomplishments, however, Invisible Children has had to cut back on its budget and staff and faces ongoing institutional pressures even as it has moved to prioritize its activities on the ground in Africa post–Kony 2012.
Paradoxes of Participatory Politics
Invisible Children’s attempts to reinvent itself post–Kony 2012 give us a starting point from which to consider the contradictions and paradoxes associated with participatory politics. We do not necessarily see IC as an exemplar, and this discussion is not intended to endorse the group’s choices. But we hope to better understand some of the challenges youth-centered networks confront as they promote social change through participatory politics. In particular, we are pointing toward fault lines within the organization that have surfaced as different segments of the group’s leadership lobby for greater or less commitment to these competing principles and as different mixes of these traits dominate various films IC produces and various campaigns it launches.
Goals <—> Process
The tension between IC’s primary policy goals, to have Joseph Kony captured and to end the LRA’s atrocities, and its main activism objective, to expand the civic capacities of its young U.S. supporters, is the central paradox within the organization. In our first meetings with IC staff in 2009, they openly admitted to being “surprised” when they first recognized that their supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands. At that time, IC also did not have any formal structures in place to organize and direct these young people’s desire to participate. Rather they relied on peer-to-peer personal connections between clubs and specific staff members to transfer knowledge that fell outside immediate IC-determined fundraising strategies. To IC’s leadership, the youth movement they had built was an unexpected outcome of their efforts to bring about the capture of Joseph Kony and support the rehabilitation of forcibly recruited child soldiers in the region.
A few months before the release of Kony 2012, IC assembled more than 650 of its most dedicated supporters for a gathering at the University of San Diego and announced that the event marked the launch of what they called Fourth Estate. While the term “fourth estate” has long been applied to the role of the press in a democratic society, IC used it to convey something different: the role of citizens in holding governments accountable. Between 2010 and 2014, IC organized three Fourth Estates. While they differed significantly in scope and size, they all took place over several days and included speeches and workshops designed to help “hardcore” IC supporters develop skills required to help the organization achieve its goals at that given moment. Here, IC shared plans with their most trusted supporters. As such, each conference provided unique insights into the organization’s shifting priorities and helped us track IC’s evolving relationship to participatory politics.
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