I didn’t watch it at first. I hit play on Youtube when it was posted to me through a Facebook chat, but it was late and I was tired. I said I’d watch it the next day, thinking it was a small enough lie to tell. 29 minutes to dedicate to Youtube....not even Kanye got that amount of Youtube time from me.
The next day I woke up and 2 people had already shared it when I flicked through Facebook on my phone before getting out of bed. When I looked at Facebook again at the coffee shop before work another 4 had shared it. By the afternoon my stream was awash. But I was at work and I still didn’t have time to look at it. We discussed it briefly during my shift. One girl said she’d watched it and was really impressed. When I got home my housemate told me I had to watch it. My other housemate said he didn’t want to. When my housemate explained who this man was I started to remember some of the things I had learnt in a class I took last year. I started to realise why he seemed so familiar. I was one of those people who had heard about Kony and the ICC and forgotten about him.
The next day I woke up and a lot more than 2 people had shared it when I flicked through Facebook on my phone before getting out of bed. It was on news websites now, it was on the radio as well and it was filling up my Twitter feed. But I was still at work. And I still couldn’t be bothered.
So at 7.50pm 2 days after I had first encountered the video I thought “fuck it”, I’ve got some time to kill. I hit ‘X’ on iTunes playing my favourite podcast, pulled a pillow up behind me and searched for “Kony 2012” on YouTube.
I wasn’t as emotionally moved as I thought I would be. Usually I’m a sucker for hyper-emotional propaganda. But this wasn’t making me cry. It was making me interested though. I wasn’t as cynically distant as I thought I would be either. In the 2 days before I watched the video I already decided I wouldn’t like it or I wouldn’t “respond well” to it as so often is my catch-cry. I still don’t know that I responded well, but I definitely responded.
Straight away I bought into the cool of the video. The guy who made it seemed so cool. He has a cool son, the young people being active in the video are cool. They’re doing cool stuff like putting up posters and wearing cool bracelets. I want to be like those people. I want to wear a cool t-shirt with a cool slogan that is more meaningful than “That Sh#t Cray” and I want to be like Shepard Fairey and do cool meaningful things. I didn’t 40 minutes ago, but I do now. And it’s beautifully easy.
For a long time I’ve been anti “getting-involved” because I saw it as a commitment to something that you could be caught out on if you don’t truly believe in the cause. But this video makes an excellent point; committing to this cause is easy. It’s as easy as sharing a video, or saying someone’s name, or wearing a bracelet. You literally don’t even have to move to be involved in this.
What’s struck me most about this video is how I can finally identify how important social networking is going to be as a part of global politics. In my years of fretting over the impact social media and social networking is going to have on my own life, I lost sight of the impact it will have on everyone else on the planet’s life as well.
If the video upset me about anything, it was the fact that it was highly America-centric and I don’t live in America, so why would I try to reach out to American politicians. But it made a point. A point that knowledge and awareness are one thing, but sometimes we lazy human beings need a kick up the ass to remember those horrific things that are too easy to ignore.
Am I going to monetarily buy into Kony 2012? I don’t know yet. Is it bad that I am still just a little bit cynical about the whole thing? Maybe. But should I just let the considerations and analysis go for a little while and maybe just let myself get involved in something that does really only involve trying to help other people? Yeah, I guess I should.
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