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“Watch 30 Minute Video on Internet, Become Social Activist”?

Kony 2012, Invisible Children, and the Paradoxes of Participatory Politics

Sangita Shresthova

Right now, there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect. And now we see each other. We hear each other. We share what we love and it reminds us of what we all have in common. And this connection is changing the way the world works. Governments are trying to keep up. The older generations are concerned. The game has new rules.

—Kony 2012

In spring 2012, Invisible Children (IC), a San Diego–based human rights organization, released Kony 2012, a 30-minute video about child soldiering in Uganda. In a central feature of the film, Jason Russell, one of the group’s founders and longtime leaders, speaks as a father to his young son about the evils perpetrated by the warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The film ends with a call for supporters to help circulate the video in order to make Kony “famous,” criticizing the lack of Western media coverage of his atrocities and demanding that the U.S. government take action to end his reign of terror. IC anticipated that the well-crafted video might reach half a million viewers by the end of the year, based on its extensive experience deploying online videos. Instead, Kony 2012 spread to more than 70 million viewers over the first four days of its release and over 100 million during its first week in March 2012. By comparison, Modern Family, then the highest rated non-sports and non-reality program on U.S. television, was attracting a

little over 7 million average weekly viewers (based on published Nielsen ratings), and The Hunger Games, the Hollywood blockbuster released on March 23 of that year, drew an audience of approximately 15–19 million during its first weekend (based on ticket sales reported by boxofficemojo.com). Inspired by the video’s celebration of the power of social media, IC’s young supporters demonstrated how grassroots networks might shift the national agenda.

The speed and scope of the pushback against Kony 2012 was almost as dramatic as its initial spread. IC and its supporters were ill prepared for the video’s movement from a relatively tight-knit network of people who knew about the organization and its mission to a much larger population learning about Kony for the first time as someone they knew posted the video on Facebook, forwarded it by email, or blasted it via Twitter. Kony 2012 drew sharp criticism from many established human rights groups and Africa experts, who questioned everything from IC’s finances to what they characterized as its “white man’s burden” rhetoric. IC was especially challenged for being out of sync with current Ugandan realities and promoting responses some argued might do more harm than good. Critics saw Kony 2012 as illustrating institutional filters and ideological blinders that have long shaped communication between the global North and South.

Kony 2012 became emblematic of a larger debate concerning attention-driven activism. In a blog post written in Kony 2012’s immediate aftermath, Ethan Zuckerman (2012a) surveys the critiques leveled against the video, stressing that it gained broad and rapid circulation by grossly oversimplifying the complexities of the conditions in Africa and creating heroic roles for Western activists while denying the agency of Africans working to change their own circumstances. Zuckerman explained: “I’m starting to wonder if this [exemplifies] a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?” This question haunts not only IC supporters, but leaders of many other activist groups.

By the time Kony 2012 hit, our team at USC had been studying Invisible Children for three years. We first learned about IC through one of its early, and still controversial, media artifacts, a short dance film entitled Invisible Children Musical (2006), which was a takeoff of Disney’s High School Musical. In this film, IC’s founders turned to popular culture, song, and dance to reach and inspire young people to take part in the Global Night Commute, a multisited live event. The Invisible Children Musical polarized our research group when we watched it during our weekly meeting. Some members were intrigued, even excited, by its unabashed appropriation of popular culture. Others literally pushed themselves away from the conference table to express their negative reaction to the film’s extravagantly celebratory and admittedly simplistic messaging.

As we learned more about the organization’s media and activities, we quickly understood that pushing the boundaries of youth activism was an integral, though not always completely intentional, part of IC’s efforts. Through a series of research projects focused on various facets of IC—including learning, transmedia storytelling, and performativity—we delved deeper into understanding the group’s media, staff, and supporters. Over the years, we observed many IC events in Southern California. We attended film screenings and watched many hours of IC media. We were invited to attend events that the group organized and visited its headquarters in San Diego many times. We interviewed 45 young people involved with IC and had regular interactions with the group’s leadership.

Our ongoing contact gave us a unique vantage point from which to observe IC as it moved from a relatively obscure initiative to an extremely visible (and overly scrutinized) organization that was asked to publicly account for all its decisions. We were also privy to the profound personal and organizational challenges IC faced as the situation around Kony 2012 escalated. And, we were part of a small group of researchers IC continued to trust after 2012. As one staff member observed in 2013, Kony 2012 had forced IC to “grow up” overnight; we were able to observe this change firsthand.

Nick Couldry (2010) begins his book Why Voice Matters by identifying the many different ways voices get denied or undermined within today’s neoliberal society. IC’s supporters were mostly drawn from the ranks of more affluent and politically influential sectors of society (see Karlin et al. forthcoming.) Surely, these youth have access to many of the levers (Zuckerman 2013a) needed to make their voices heard. Yet many of them had not been involved in civic life before and would not have become politically active without IC’s supportive community. In this book’s later chapters, we will see more dramatic examples of marginalized groups seeking collective power through participatory politics, but it’s worth stressing that political engagement is not guaranteed even among those who come from more privileged backgrounds. Supporting this perspective, Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson (forthcoming) show how memes critical of Kony 2012 exploited stereotypes that young people are ignorant, irrational, duped, or apathetic. Couldry (2010) reminds us, “People’s voices only count if their bodies matter,” noting that existing forms of discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, and so forth ensure that some voices go unheard (130), and we must surely add to that list the marginalization which has historically occurred as children and youth first assert themselves into political debates. Couldry also reminds us that “an unequal distribution of narrative resources” may also serve to limit which voices can be heard, since some forms of political speech are more readily recognized than others within institutional politics or journalism (9). The groups we are studying are seeking to expand the languages through which politics can be expressed, finding new vocabularies that make sense in the life contexts of young citizens; as they do so, however, they may often express their messages in ways that make them less likely to be heard by key decision makers.

In this chapter, we use IC and Kony 2012 to explore the potentials and challenges of participatory politics. Three years after the film’s release, we remain distinctly ambivalent about whether the film’s immense spreadability translated into a net success for the organization and the youth movement it inspired. We thus use IC and Kony 2012 to identify some of the paradoxes that must be addressed if we are going to understand whether and in what ways the mechanisms of participatory politics might promote meaningful political change and foster greater civic engagement. The paradoxes we identify here reflect recurring questions the organization faced during this period of crisis and success: How much should IC focus on expanding the youth movement it had built up through the years via its focused anti-LRA efforts? Could IC accept its members’ desire for a more participatory organizational model or should it try to retain control over their messaging? Could the story IC told be both simple enough to be easily graspable and complex enough to do justice to the nuances of the LRA conflict? How could IC make its humanitarian and social justice work fun without compromising its acceptance by policy makers and NGOs? And why didn’t IC work harder to balance the friendship and cordiality it so treasured with training that equipped its supporters to deal with contentious situations related to its cause? Above all, should this innovative organization be judged based on the results it achieved in pursuit of its policy goals or based on the ways it recruited and empowered a generation of young activists who might have an impact on a broader range of issues?

We watched IC’s leaders and supporters twist and turn as they experimented with different responses to these core paradoxes; we saw the group move between models that were more top-down or goal focused and others that were more participatory and process focused. The enormous success of Kony 2012 brought all of these tensions to a crisis point from which the organization never fully recovered. Each of the groups in our other case studies confront some of these same tensions; each represents a somewhat different model for how successful organizations might solicit and support the participation of their members in an age of networked communication; each group made its own choices, and, yes, its own mistakes, as they sought to address these defining challenges around civic culture in the early 21st century. Few of the cases, though, illustrate these paradoxes as fully as IC does and that’s why we are starting here.

Moving beyond the Clicktivism Critique

On August 8, 2013, Jason Russell addressed an auditorium full of young IC supporters. After some initial lighthearted comments, his demeanor changed. “I want to give you a little glimpse into what was going on inside of me,” he said. He then recounted the days following Kony 2012’s release that led up to his public mental breakdown. “I wrote down all the things that we were pissing off, that we were disrupting, that we were questioning,” he recalled. “The list looked like this: Hollywood, social networking, online media, movies, activism, United Nations, America, millennials, journalism, nonprofits, fashion, advertising, and international justice.” He explained that’s when he realized “why they’re so pissed off.” In his words, it was “because it’s … the whole world that is going, ‘Who is this? Who are you? How dare you load a 29-minute 59-second video online? And how dare you reach 120 million people in five days? That’s not allowed. Something must be fishy. You must be a scam.’” At this point, his usually enthusiastic audience fell silent. Russell’s recounting of his personal experiences took everyone back to the moment when the initial excitement about Kony 2012’s phenomenal spread gave way to the backlash against Russell, Invisible Children, and the group’s young supporters. In Move, a film IC released in the fall of 2012, IC communication director Noelle West described her experience:

My cloud nine quickly dissolved.… Our website wasn’t built to maintain 35,000 concurrent viewers at one time. So our website’s crashing intermittently. The only thing we could communicate through was Tumblr. So you’re not going to see information about every single thing that we do from a Tumblr. And that was, I think, the beginning of the conversation turn from “this was the greatest thing on the planet” to “what the hell is this?”

In the same film, Russell described the criticism as a “tsunami” that IC “didn’t see coming.” In his words, “We turned around, and we were all under water.”

Something of the vicious tone of the critiques is captured in comments from Ugandan activist, social media strategist, and blogger TMS Ruge (2012a), who defined Kony 2012 as “another travesty in shepherd’s clothing befalling my country and my continent.” To Ruge, the film was “so devoid of nuance, utility and respect for agency that it is appallingly hard to contextualize.” Ruge, along with other critics, also questioned the effectiveness of purchasing “a T-shirt and bracelet” as acts that would somehow end a two-decade-long conflict. Other critics accused IC of exploiting the naiveté and ignorance of its young supporters, who they feared would confuse the feel-good process of spreading a YouTube video with the hard work involved in changing a complex international situation.

One internet meme summed up the phenomenon: “Watch 30 Minute Video on Internet, Become Social Activist.” This meme is, in many ways, emblematic of a larger critique of so-called clicktivism, defined as the application of the metrics and methods of the marketplace (number of clicks) to measure the success of (arguably) activist efforts. As one critic explains, “The end result is the degradation of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events. Political engagement becomes a matter of clicking a few links. In promoting the illusion that surfing the web can change the world, clicktivism is to activism as McDonald’s is to a slow-cooked meal. It may look like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone” (White 2010). The clicktivist critique often describes online campaigns as involving limited risk or exertion and having limited impact on institutional politics.

A meme that critiqued and ridiculed the Kony 2012 campaign.

The New York Times’ Room for Debate introduced its discussion of Kony 2012, tellingly titled “Fight War Crimes, without Leaving the Couch?” (2012), with this provocation: “Social media definitely have the power to bring attention to terrible problems—but is there a downside, if the ‘call to action’ is wrong-headed or if these campaigns give young people a false sense of what it really takes to create change?” While networked communications has made it easier for citizens to access and act upon information, making it possible for movements like Kony 2012 to achieve remarkable speed and scope, we must keep in mind these developments have not always been seen as a positive thing.

Indeed, the most persistent skepticism centers around whether these new platforms and practices make it too easy to take action without ensuring that people have time to reflect. Writing in the midst of the boom and bust surrounding the video, Mark A. Drumbl (2012) concluded: “The Kony 2012 campaign—and clicktivism generally—have short attention spans and limited shelf life” (484). Some speak about compassion fatigue in a world where political messages get carried by dramatic and simplified videos and then diminish as participants feel the tug of yet another story and another appeal for action. The premise that IC’s supporters could achieve dramatic results by mobilizing massive numbers of people online was resoundingly ridiculed by memes, ironically generated and circulated by other internet users, such as one that announced, “You shared Kony 2012? Congratulations—you saved Africa.” Malcom Gladwell’s (2010) critique that Twitter revolutions involved lower risks than previous political movements was expressed by another widely circulated cartoon depicting an exchange between activists of two different generations. The older one, wearing an eye patch, explains, “I lost my eye in a five day student protest in 1970,” while the younger one explains, “I just sprained my clicking finger joining a Facebook protest group.”

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Kjerstin Thorson (forthcoming) identified and tracked 135 such memes circulated in response to the Kony 2012 campaign, almost all of which were negative in their characterization of IC and its efforts. They saw such memes as part of a struggle over what constitutes good citizenship, with the memes mostly referring back to classic conceptions of the informed citizen some felt were under threat from Kony 2012’s more networked model of participation. Michael Schudson (1999) and Roger Hurwitz (2004) have discussed a shift from the older model of the informed citizen toward an emerging model of the monitorial citizen. Under the informed citizen model, people need to possess full knowledge of an issue before they can act politically. Given the complexity of many contemporary issues, this standard is often impossible to achieve and the failure to meet expectations based on it can result in a sense of disempowerment. By contrast, in a networked society, people can monitor specific concerns and then use social media to alert each other to issues requiring greater attention or collective action. We can see the circulation of these political videos as one mechanism through which monitorial citizenship works. Kligler-Vilenchik and Thorson conclude that the anti–Kony 2012 memes “may suppress budding political interest and engagement” by dismissing both a political cause that engaged many young people and ridiculing the forms of political participation they chose to make their voices heard: “young networked citizens may be experimenting with new ways not only to become informed, but to act on that information.”

A meme created by Peter Ajtai of insert-joke-here.com pitted generations against each other in the slacktivism debate.

If all that happens is the spread of a video, then the system of monitorial citizenship will have failed. However, our research shows that this is not what happened with Kony 2012, nor was it what IC intended when it released the film. On the contrary, IC saw such circulations as a point of entry into more intense kinds of political engagement. A high percentage of those reached by such social awareness campaigns may well shift their attention elsewhere, but some research (Andresen 2011) suggests that the act of passing along a video increases the likelihood that participants will take other kinds of action in support of the cause, including contributing time and money. A large part of IC’s argument for “making Kony famous” was that, for many years, his atrocities received relatively little media coverage and escaped intense scrutiny from the international community. The group hoped that increased awareness would result in shifts in media coverage and public policy that would hinder the LRA’s mobility.

Echoing this, the IC supporters we interviewed post–Kony 2012 made very realistic claims about the effectiveness of online advocacy campaigns. Nineteen-year-old Johnny discussed writing a class essay critiquing Gladwell’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” He explained his perspective: “[Facebook and Twitter] definitely can be used as a medium to gather people, to get attention, but it can’t be the only thing. At the end of the day, you need bills to be passed. You need money to be raised, but if that [social media] can be used to spread awareness and get the word out and help these things be achieved, that’s great. Kony 2012 proved that.” Johnny described the video as a catalyst setting other things into motion, creating the awareness and support that enabled Congress to pass laws impacting what was happening in Africa. In his model, participatory and institutionalized politics worked together to achieve the desired results.

IC offered its members varying degrees of participation, including involvement in large-scale mass gatherings and attendance at training sessions, while it also worked more directly with elite institutions and political power brokers. In fact, many of the supporters we met saw the range of participation IC offered and the “hip” tone of these engagements as crucial to the group’s appeal to youth. Stephanie, an IC college club member, confirmed this when she observed that the organization “is really good about having different campaigns” that offer multiple ways to participate and many points for potential engagement that might begin, for instance, with attending an IC screening and grow over time. The bucket list of IC-related activities the youth described included organizing local IC events (often designed to be celebratory in tone), creating their own media to recruit members for local clubs, using social media to maintain support, setting up information tables at their local school or college, designing T-shirts, fundraising toward specific IC goals, and even interning or touring with IC. To Janelle, who was interning with IC at the time of her interview, the key to IC’s success with young people is their “youthful, hip vibe,” which she attributed to the fact that “everyone in the boardroom is 30 years and younger.” As Stephanie reflected on her IC experience, she also appreciated the support and advice she received in running her local club as IC’s responsive staff helped her navigate various logistical and organizational challenges.

Over time, IC supported more explicit political lobbying efforts. For example Jack, a college sophomore, described the ways that IC had enabled him to directly contact Senate staffers during a visit to Washington:

The fact that the staff members of a senator could actually listen to a 17-year-old was pretty amazing.… [IC does] a very good job of preparing us.… The lobbying meetings I’ve attended in the last few years have been based around specific legislation or resolutions that they’re seeking to pass or, you know, stuff like that. So you get a point of contact from the office and then they send us—they put together, you know, guides, very detailed guides, for both the lobby people leaders and, then, if you have first-time lobby members in your group, they have specific guides for them. And they detail everything from what you should wear to a meeting to what you should talk about.

Jillian, a 22-year-old from Pennsylvania, similarly described the ways that IC provided her and her classmates with the scaffolding they needed to deal directly with their elected officials. She noted that the IC staff members would often call to debrief with her team on what worked or didn’t after a meeting took place. The tendency to reduce Invisible Children to a 30-minute video undervalues the much broader array of media tactics the group deploys. Similarly, the idea that this movement depends primarily on short-term reactions to rapidly spreading content underestimates the number of young people who have participated in afterschool organizations, been trained by the roadies who travel the country showing IC films and leading workshops with supporters, gathered for massive scale public protests, attended one of the Fourth Estate conferences, or flown to Washington to lobby government officials.

Clicktivist 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 patronizing in the way Russell was explaining the human rights issues to his young son, longtime supporters saw the video as a moment of maturation, having first seen Russell as a hapless college student in the Rough Cut, in contrast to his now stepping into a different—more adult and responsible—role. Meanwhile, the context critics felt was missing from this particular 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.

IC’s dawning realization about the broader generational implications of its youth base became fully apparent at the first Fourth Estate gathering, which featured both IC-specific programming and more general youth activist sessions. Presenters gave lectures on Uganda’s complex colonial and postcolonial history, latest troop movements, and details of IC’s plans for the upcoming year, not to mention an overview of ethical issues in international development and a history of colonialism and postcolonial nation-states in the so-called developing world. Given IC’s ongoing need to raise funds, the youth spent a significant amount of time generating possible fundraising ideas for the group’s upcoming campaign as they shared success stories with each other. They also explored their own motivations for getting involved with IC, and what that might mean in their longer youth activist trajectory. They were even encouraged to write or otherwise document their own “IC story.” For the first time, IC acknowledged them as more than “just” enthusiastic fundraisers rallying behind the group’s operations in the U.S. and abroad.

In 2011, IC still believed that its paramount goals, to capture Kony and disarm the LRA, could coexist with and drive its expanding youth movement work. As Jedidiah Jenkins observed, IC’s specific mission, after all, initially attracted youth. If IC hadn’t had a very specific stated goal, what would inspire their young supporters to get involved? The IC we observed in 2011 embraced an approach that our team (Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova 2012) identified as “learning through practice,” which valued participation and process. Many “traditional” civic organizations enable youth to participate based on an apprenticeship model, in which they work under the guidance of trained experts (see, e.g., Kirshner 2006, 2008). In 2011, IC exhibited a more participatory model, allowing young people to take control of their own activities while still supporting IC’s organizational goals.

A little over a year after Kony 2012, IC hosted a second, and scaled-up, Fourth Estate conference at UCLA. Focused predominantly on larger-format sessions, the tone and structure of this gathering were dramatically different from the initial event. The second Fourth Estate was much more scripted, giving young participants fewer opportunities to shape activities. Programs focused less on grassroots media production and more on showcasing IC’s filmmaking prowess; less on social media circulation and more on formal fundraising; less on participation and more on spectacle; and less on peer-to-peer connections and more on top-down and celebrity-focused messaging. While IC staff attributed some of these shifts to organizational limitations they faced in pulling together a much larger event that included more than 1,400 participants, the changes are also symptomatic of an organization still struggling to regain control and sense of direction after Kony 2012. In particular, the second Fourth Estate revealed continuing tensions in IC’s vision of new and social media, which may have surprised those who knew IC only through Kony 2012. On one hand, IC staff realized that their supporters are “online”—that this sense of connectivity is a vital aspect of what politics means for the millennial generation they see as their core constituency. On the other hand, they privileged “in person” interactions as more substantive and meaningful.

The theater stage was framed with Fourth Estate–branded logos, which served as a constant reminder of who had organized the event and why. While long-term celebrity supporters like Kristen Bell and Jon Chu made an appearance at both Fourth Estates, the second one included a red carpet reception after which the selected celebrities and other invitees were escorted to the upper balcony of UCLA’s Royce Auditorium to hear U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power speak and witness IC’s ability to engage young people first hand (and from above). Through this impressive display, IC worked to inspire its youth base with motivational speeches and success stories, while largely denying them the chance to directly impact the political narratives being constructed. To some degree, the organization, under attack for most of the previous year, used the second Fourth Estate to “circle the wagons,” seeking to protect itself from further missteps and reframe its messages for the campaign’s next stage.

Those who criticized IC for its shallow engagement with underlying social justice issues may have been surprised to see the organization make much more overt gestures toward embracing an expanded “millennial youth” identity at the second Fourth Estate. This pivot was apparent in a future-oriented exhibit of real and imagined Time magazine covers that IC created for the VIP event. The first three covers were real and focused on actual debates around war, millennials, and the spread of Kony 2012. Six fictional covers then portrayed events that IC imagined as possible outcomes. The first imagined cover, dated March 5, 2013 (a year after Kony 2012 was released), announced Joseph Kony’s arrest under the title “#KONYCAPTURED.” The following five covers shifted toward imagined visions of global justice and culminated with the victorious headline “How Fourth Estate United One Billion Youth and Changed Earth,” clearly establishing IC’s investment in the generational debates around millennials. In many ways, IC’s second Fourth Estate was a visible display of this investment.

As these real and imagined Time covers reveal, post–Kony 2012, IC embraced its role as speaking to, for, and with, millennials. In fact, all the youth we interviewed at IC’s second Fourth Estate explicitly saw themselves as members of the millennial generation, a generation that they felt had been unfairly criticized for its apathy regarding civic life. Generally identified as those born between 1982 and 2004, millennials have indeed been front and center in debates focused on attitudinal and sociocultural shifts. As a Time magazine headline from May 20, 2013—“Me, Me, Me Generation: Millennials Are Lazy, Entitled Narcissists Who Still Live with Their Parents”—suggests, much of the negative commentary around this generation has centered on the premise that they are self-centered, rely on external support, and do not care about the world around them. By contrast, IC used fictional Time covers to imagine a future defined by millennials, who, in its vision, will ultimately make the world more “humane” and “united.”

In Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000), Neil Howe and William Strauss also argue for a much more optimistic view on millennials, whom they see as a generation that “is going to rebel by behaving not worse, but better” (7). More specifically, the authors predict that

[t]he coming of age of the Millennial Generation is likely to take place in the midst of a profound shift in America’s social mood, a shift that will match and reflect the new generation’s persona. For Millennials, this shift will focus on the needs of the community more than the individual, it is likely to induce large-scale institutional change. Thus, the word rebellion is not entirely appropriate. The word revolution might better capture the spirit of what lies ahead. (67)

Through the second Fourth Estate, IC explicitly aligned itself with the possibility of a millennial-led revolution marked by a shift toward a worldview that sees personal connections between human beings as the foundation for a new sense of social justice and community.

Through its embrace of millennials, IC responded to many of the criticisms leveled at the organization and its most famous media production. It also publicly acknowledged that its ability to connect with young people was, in fact, a key strength. This pro-millennial stance resonated with the young people we interviewed, who saw their involvement with IC as crucial to countering negative perspectives about their generation. Several speakers at the second Fourth Estate picked up on the millennial theme. Luis Moreno Ocampo, head of the International Criminal Court, expressed his admiration for the youth at the Fourth Estate several times during his speech. On the last day, Samantha Power, the newly appointed ambassador to the U.N., drove this message home once more. Responding to the standing ovation she received when she came onto the stage, she opened her speech with “OMG.” Power explained that when she thought about where she should make her first public speech in her new role, there was only one answer—to “spend this time with the people who are determined to promote human rights and human dignity, the next generation who are going to make a profound difference. I was determined to spend my first official weekend with you.”

Over time, our continued engagement with the organization revealed the challenges IC has faced in maintaining this balance between its Africa-facing goals and its youth-driven process. Even before Kony 2012, the organization’s leadership often brought our discussions back to clarifying IC’s primary goals, capturing Kony and disarming the LRA. At the same time, many of the young supporters we interviewed felt that IC would continue to exist post-Kony, though they often disagreed on how the scope and focus of the organization would transform. Some felt IC could take on different specific humanitarian issues. Others wanted it to form partnerships with groups that could benefit from its experience in mobilizing youth. They saw a value in fostering greater youth agency and voice and encouraging more participation in core public debates whether or not the organization ever achieved its explicit goals on the ground in Africa. Ironically, when IC was criticized for spending too much of the funds it raised in the United States, this focus on building youth capacity was the core subtext: fostering young activists was becoming a central part of its mission, while the group’s critics saw those young people as much like the staff of any other nonprofit organization—a means to an end.

Comprehensible <—> Complex Stories

One key characteristic of participatory politics has been a renewed emphasis on political storytelling and the civic imagination. IC continually negotiates between the recognition that the LRA conflict is complex and stretches far back into colonial history and the perceived need to communicate with its supporters through simple, graspable, and engaging storytelling. Ethan Zuckerman (2012a) argues that this focus on storytelling was central to Kony 2012’s success:

The campaign Invisible Children is running is so compelling because it offers an extremely simple narrative: Kony is a uniquely bad actor, a horrific human being, whose capture will end suffering for the people of Northern Uganda. If each of us does our part, influences powerful people, the world’s most powerful military force will take action and Kony will be captured.… We are asked to join the campaign against Kony literally by being spoken to as a five year old. It’s not surprising that a five year old vision of a problem—a single bad guy, a single threat to eliminate—leads to an unworkable solution. Nor is it a surprise that this extremely simple narrative is compelling and easily disseminated.

Zuckerman notes that this narrative might push the United States toward a closer alliance with other African leaders who are not necessarily more democratic or have no better records on human rights. He describes some of what would need to be included if the group was to move beyond a good-and-evil framing of the situation: “A more complex narrative of northern Uganda would look at the odd, codependent relationship between Museveni and Kony, Uganda’s systematic failure to protect the Acholi people of northern Uganda. It would look at the numerous community efforts, often led by women, to mediate conflicts and increase stability.” Zuckerman worries that simplified narratives like IC’s may lead to a public response that is closer to a moral panic than to collective deliberation over important policy concerns. Yet he also acknowledges that the debate provoked by Kony 2012—the editorials, blogs, and podcasts that responded to and complicated its narrative—resulted in a more robust exchange about America’s policy toward Uganda.

Staunch supporters often see IC’s compelling stories and content world as crucial to their success. As Meg, a young woman featured in a short film that screened during the second Fourth Estate, observed, “I think the reason that Invisible Children spoke so powerfully to me is because they believe … that every single person is unique and has their own powerful story. I think that if more people could connect to those individual stories there would be a lot more empathy and compassion in the world.” Though IC has told many stories over the years, two narratives remain fairly constant: IC’s origin story and the call-to-action story that presents Joseph Kony as an unquestionably evil force that needs to be stopped. IC’s origin story starts with its founders’ first trip to Africa in search of subject matter for a film project. As Jason Russell recounted during the first Fourth Estate, when he met the night commuters—Ugandan children who traveled to safer locations every night to avoid abductions by the LRA—he knew they had found that story. In an emotional and pivotal moment in Invisible Children: Rough Cut, IC’s first film, Tony—one of these night commuters—asks the filmmakers whether they will forget him when they return to the United States. Jason made a promise to not only remember, but also to help end the conflict and bring Joseph Kony to justice. In IC films, capturing Kony, as an individual, remains key to resolving the conflict in Uganda and ending the suffering it causes.

There is some truth to Zuckerman’s “simple narrative” critique: IC media generally shies away from a deeper, more complex discussion of the LRA, contemporary Ugandan politics, and postcolonial histories. As Swartz (2012) observes, IC’s U.S.-based stories (that is, stories of its founders and youth supporters) remain much more fleshed out than the stories of their Ugandan staff and beneficiaries.

That said, the group made efforts to change this situation over time. When we first started our research, the Ugandan staff did not even appear on IC’s website, something the group’s leaders addressed very soon after we presented our first research findings to them in 2010. As the founders’ initial contact in Uganda and now IC’s regional ambassador, Jolie Grace Okot has figured as a key validating figure in the organization’s African narrative. IC also brought program staff and youth beneficiaries to the United States to join its roadie teams. As one participant observed, the Ugandan roadies were always a very important part of IC’s U.S. awareness raising campaigns and post–Kony 2012, they became absolutely essential in establishing a more authentic IC narrative.

Outside of more in-depth sessions at the Fourth Estate, IC’s presentation of the cause and solution of the conflict remains fairly simple. Specifically, the organization sees Joseph Kony as the problem, raising awareness about him and eventually capturing him as the solution. IC’s continued commitment to this simple story and clear call to action obfuscates much more complex pieces in the group’s sprawling media output, which includes stories where the founders question their motivations and qualifications, stories of Ugandans affected by the conflict, accounts of IC’s rehabilitation programs for former child soldiers, and recently, more technically complex narratives of partnering with other NGOs in the region to create media (flyers and radio broadcasts) that encourage LRA defections. While these more complex narratives are readily available to those who dig deeper, IC’s outward-facing media rarely invites such investigation as it still privileges sharing its simple, graspable, powerful, and therefore easily actionable story.

Activism <—> Entertainment

When we asked IC staff what events inspired their plans for the second Fourth Estate, the leaders mentioned Comic-Con, South by Southwest, and Lady Gaga concerts. They said that they wanted to create an event “they would want to go to,” and the final result included spectacular dance performances by the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD) on the first and last days, music concerts that lasted late into the night, and appearances by celebrities from the worlds of entertainment and activism, whose ranks included Harry Shum Jr., Sophia Bush, Rachel Bilson, The Buried Life, and South African activist Jay Naidoo. When IC launched a new campaign, ZeroLRA, in 2013, Jason Russell, in an interview with Time, described the initiative as “Netflix meets the Peace Corps meets Comic-Con.” For IC, navigating between more traditional, tonally more serious modes of activism and a more playful, entertaining, and youthful approach involves a constant balancing act.

This focus on the ties between entertainment value and activism was part of what initially drew our team’s attention to Invisible Children. When we screened Invisible Children: Rough Cut, many of us felt that the media it most closely resembled was the MTV practical-joke program Jackass, as the hapless young activists stumble their way through Uganda before being politically awakened by discovering the LRA’s night raids to abduct children, especially young boys, to become forced participants in their paramilitary organization. Many of the IC members we interviewed stressed how the rough-hewn quality of that early video created an instant identification with the organization’s leaders, allowing them to imagine themselves as part of the movement. Beth, an IC intern, explained, “The movie is just very raw, and it’s—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.” Jade, another intern, shared that the media IC produces “has a lot of a younger feel to it … you can definitely tell that the people who work here are a lot younger, they are a lot more media-savvy than a lot of the orgs. They draw in a different crowd than a lot of organizations; other orgs draw large donors and we are staffed by young people, we focus on young people and we realize that young people can make a difference if they’re really passionate about it.”

Melissa Brough (2012) notes a narcissistic tone in IC’s initial appeals that feels more rooted in the realm of consumerism and self-help than in philanthropy and social change movements as we might imagine them historically:

In IC’s media, emphasis is placed on the American donor/activist as much as, if not more than, IC’s beneficiaries. Invisible Children’s videos unapologetically embrace the opportunity for personal growth offered by entrepreneurial participation in the humanitarian adventure. IC sends the winners of high school fundraising competitions, organized through an online social networking site, to Uganda to visit the schools and camps of internally displaced communities that their funds support.” (181–182)

And this may be what got under the skin of the organization’s critics. In an article that examines Kony 2012’s impact on portrayals of child soldiers, Mark Drumbl (2012) asks, “Is it sensible for international law and policy to be based upon stylized content deliberately airbrushed just to increase attention-worthiness?” (485). In a similar, even more critical, vein, Patricia Daley (2013) introduces Kony 2012 as “a celebrity-supported geopolitical campaign, masquerading as humanitarian” (384) and concludes that

Kony2012 and other celebrity-supported advocacy, such as United to End Genocide, promote a form of global citizenship under neoliberal governance that seeks to mobilise global youth on international issues from a narrow militaristic, corporate and politically conservative perspective, whilst claiming to be transcending politics. (387)

As IC continues to blend entertainment and social justice through its media and activities, it remains vulnerable to such critiques. And yet this ability to make social justice entertaining is what supporters and staff see as crucial to the organization’s continued appeal to youth. Cathy, an IC supporter who first got involved when she was in high school, feels it belongs to a group of organizations that strive to “make charity and humanitarian work attractive” by creating media and events that engage and entertain as much as they educate.

Drawing comparisons between case studies of fan cultures around entertainment media and social movements that have grown around democratic struggles, Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) argues that the walls between the two are breaking down. She writes about American Idol, for example, that “the discussion, participation, creativity, interventions, judgments and votes that take place around reality television are all activities that would qualify as civic competencies if they were performed in the context of the political realm.” Not only are popular television shows modeling for their viewers what democracy looks and feels like through what John Hartley (2006) has called “plebiscite entertainment,” but activist groups are also actively modeling themselves after fan communities. As discussed in Chapter 1, such interactions might once have taken the form of culture jamming—turning mass entertainment against itself—but today they operate under a different valence.

Writing about détournement in Beautiful Trouble, a print and online guide for contemporary activists, Zack Malitz (2012) talks about the importance of cultural “fluency.” “The better you know a culture, the easier it is to shift, repurpose, or disrupt it,” he argues. “To be successful, the media artifact chosen for détournement must be recognizable to its intended audience. Further, the saboteur must be familiar with the subtleties of the artifact’s original meaning in order to effectively create a new, critical meaning” (30). Stephen Duncombe (2012b), another contributor to Beautiful Trouble, takes this idea of cultural fluency further: “You may not like or be familiar with Nascar, professional sports, reality TV and superheroes, but they are all fertile arenas of culture to work with. It may take an open mind and a bit of personal courage, but it behooves us to immerse ourselves in, learn about and respect the world of the cultural ‘Other’—which, for many of us counter-culture types, ironically, is mass culture” (144). He warns that activists cannot afford to ignore the reactionary dimensions of popular texts lest they reproduce them in the process of circulating their counternarratives, yet they also must not remain aloof from the desires and fantasies that motivate fan investments. Duncombe argues that political truths must be “communicated in new and compelling ways that can be passed from person to person, even if this requires flights of fancy and new mythologies” (231). For him, that involves learning from Hollywood, Las Vegas, the games industry, and Madison Avenue.

Yet IC’s commitment to the use of popular culture goes beyond the “hold your nose and try not to go native” advice given in Beautiful Trouble. The group’s leaders do not see the genres they use to construct their media as forays into “the world of the cultural ‘Other.’” Rather, they see these uses of popular media as fundamental to the organization’s approach. Reflecting on the Invisible Children Musical in an interview with this chapter’s author, Jason Russell explained why he sees popular culture—and specifically music and dance—as important to what IC does:

When you’re nonprofit, you always compromise on the quality of the content that you’re putting out. And so no one opens the email. No one watches the movie. No one buys the T-shirts, because they’re ugly and no one spent any time creating them. We were really drawn to Bono and Apple’s conviction of always making beautiful things. That musical really just came out of the love for Captain EO and Michael Jackson. My brother said, “Listen to the lyrics of the song: ‘We are here to change the world.’ Isn’t that what you are trying to do?” And I said, “We should just do that because it’s unorthodox.” The academic community will get pissed off, and it will get young people to say, “Wow, you can actually have fun and celebrate and dance and sing while you’re changing the world. What a cool concept.”

Colin, who had gotten involved with the cause in high school and has become even more active in college, stressed the importance of design aesthetics in shaping public perception of IC’s messaging. Many other members stressed the ways that they first learned about Kony through IC’s videos and noted that what had attracted them in the first place was that the organization’s media did not feel too “causy” when read against other social advocacy materials they had encountered. IC does not simply translate its messages into the language of pop culture; the group’s leaders—and their youth supporters—are natural speakers of these languages, with Hollywood genres and pop culture remixes a central part of their experiences since childhood. These issues surface much more dramatically for fan activism groups like the Harry Potter Alliance and the Nerdfighters, which are discussed in the next chapter. Critics such as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2013) fear that efforts like IC’s videos amount to the commodification of collective desires for social change and an extension of entertainment values into the political realm. Yet the opposite could also be true—that these efforts involve a hijacking of the vast publicity apparatus to spread political messages that might not otherwise be heard.

Consensus <—> Contention

That groups such as Invisible Children work more through consensus than conflict has been central to their success and reflects the value they place on what Jeff Weintraub (1997) characterizes as “sociability” (17). This more sociable style of civic participation can be enormously appealing to a generation often sickened by today’s harsh partisanship. IC provided a supportive environment for young participants to take their first tentative steps into activism, gain greater confidence in their efficacy, and prepare to take action on issues they cared about. Yet, for this very reason, IC’s young supporters seemed remarkably unprepared for criticisms of Kony 2012. Members of traditional party-based and advocacy groups ready themselves to confront oppositional perspectives. Most of the first 13 Freedom Riders in the civil rights movement (see Carson 1995, 31–38), for example, were seasoned activist members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As a part of this organization, they had experience and training that prepared them to react appropriately when they were called names, spat upon, and physically assaulted as they confronted the defenders of Southern segregation on the ground. The PBS documentary Freedom Riders (2010) includes archival footage of such training and shows activists enacting situations they were likely to encounter. For example, there is a scene set in a diner in which activists are slandered and asked to leave because of their skin color when they try to order coffee. As CORE staff member Gordon Carey recalls in the film, “The training we did … prior to the time the Riders got on buses was largely devoted to trying to see how the person’s gonna react.” In contrast, when IC’s core leadership turned inward to deal with Russell’s personal tragedy, the group’s young supporters were left alone to rebut the mounting attacks against Kony 2012. In some cases, they rose to the occasion, demonstrating a great capacity to seek out and deploy information. But, in others, they lacked the critical skills needed to address skeptical classmates or family members.

Sanyu Lobogo, a young Ugandan American, became one of the most visible faces of the anti–Invisible Children movement when she posted a YouTube video insisting that Kony had been dead and his organization ineffective for five years: “The Kony 2012 Video is not the only information you should rely on. Research. I am all for the cause, just not the video that was made. Do your own research and come back with more info!” Her perspective became increasingly more militant as she, in turn, had to deal with aggressive pushback from IC supporters. One of the IC roadies described what happened when the group screened Kony 2012 at Lobogo’s school: “She [Lobogo] had tweeted out to everyone, ‘The Invisible scam are coming in today. Don’t go.’ It was the most unsuccessful screening we had, eight people there or something. It was awful.”

In other cases, though, the group was able to create a context where critics could be engaged in a more constructive manner. Grant Oyston, a college sophomore, had posted some critiques of IC on his blog visiblechildren.tumblr.com, intending to express his distrust to a close circle of friends. However, in a matter of days, his post had been read more than 2 million times. While Oyston’s original post was later widely deployed by IC critics, in a later post he argued that he was simply trying to counterbalance the video’s framing: “My purpose was simply to show other elements of the story, things that weren’t included in the video—obviously there are constraints to what you can fit into a video, but to show things that weren’t discussed in the video. To talk about other organizations, to talk about—as I understand it, what Invisible Children does and where the money goes. I raised some concerns about it certainly, but my end goal was always to have people understand more and learn more, get a better sense and then do whatever they think is the right thing to do, with the best information possible … but by no means was this an attack on the great work that Invisible Children has done and continues to do.” When Oyston encountered a group of IC roadies on his campus, he ended up talking with them for more than an hour, and ultimately granting an interview for the Invisible Children blog on March 21, 2013, in which he told readers: “You’re telling a story that’s been going on for multiple decades and involves thousands of people.… No one person is ever going to understand everything about the story. That’s impossible. But if it’s something you care about you owe it to yourself to do your best to learn what you can as a reasonable person and get a decent understanding of what’s going on.”

Many of the youth we interviewed experienced the pushback against Kony 2012 as a repudiation of their values and beliefs. One of them, Molly, reported, “I think after Kony 2012 we were kind of walking on eggshells with what we posted online and what we said.… I feel like we were bullied. People were picking at every little thing and we were nervous and we were kind of just like we had been around for so long and people stuck with us and we’re going to keep our voice.… We’re not going to stop because somebody is posting on our Facebook that we’re a scam or liars.” As Kony 2012 spread, it also reached youth who were not directly involved with IC. For example, 15-year-old Theo, a member of the Nerdfighter community discussed in the next chapter, mentioned his encounter with Kony 2012 when interviewed about his experience with Nerdfighteria. At first, he found the film “very moving” but later had “second thoughts” about getting involved as he encountered critiques of IC’s finances. Kevin, another Nerdfighter we interviewed, felt that the critiques leveraged against Kony 2012 actually applied to online activism more generally as it became clear that many people who may have shared the film “didn’t investigate the issue at all.”

While some of the young IC supporters felt that they experienced most of the pushback online, even as they received support from classmates and family at the local level, others found that the online controversy brought the issues into their everyday interactions within their school communities. Natalie, a recent high school graduate, reported, “I think the reason I’m afraid of criticism is because the kids at my school were already criticizing me about it, and I didn’t know what to do.… The more popular it got, the worse the criticism is going to be.” In some cases, the youth were driven away from political engagement as a result of their inability to adequately address these critiques. Natalie did not leave IC—in fact, she took a year off from school to intern in Uganda—but she did describe her growing frustration over her inability to combat what she saw as misperceptions of the group and its agenda: “I’m really going to fight back. I really want to make sure that these people at the end of this argument are on my side. And then they will support Invisible Children. At the same time, I realized that no matter how many facts we threw their way … no matter how many conversations we had, there was nothing that I can do to persuade them.… Sometimes you have to take the criticism, and you just have to walk away.” Molly left these sorts of exchanges more determined than ever to get her message out: “We’re going to take those criticisms and we’re going to look at them. But we’re not going to ignore them. When we see something like, ‘You need more information on your website,’ so we’re going to buff up our website. So we’re going to put more information on the website. We’re going to put more videos. We’re going to put more information out there.”

Molly frames the problem as a lack of information—which was partially the case, as the IC website, which the organization had failed to fully update prior to the video’s launch because it anticipated a much slower spread of the message, crashed during the early days of the controversy. Yet our research suggests a much deeper problem: the group had done little to help its supporters to acquire skills in formulating and articulating their own opinions, and it had neither reviewed potential counterarguments nor provided its network with the resources needed to rebut them. This failure is consistent with a core finding of the MacArthur survey on youth and participatory politics (Cohen and Kahne 2012): 84 percent of the young people interviewed said that they would “benefit from learning more about how to tell if news and information you find online is trustworthy” (viii).

More recently, IC has placed a stronger emphasis on fostering these critical literacy skills. During interviews conducted following the second Fourth Estate conference, IC roadies and staff mentioned that they hadn’t previously felt it urgent to model responses for and provide debating skills to their youth supporters but that they definitely did so now. As one informal step, IC created “trolling Thursday” on its Facebook page, taking on criticism received that week through social media, sharing it with committed supporters, and publishing the information needed to respond to the critiques. Some of our other case study networks have done much more to foster critical deliberation and prepare their members to defend their positions.

Spreadable <—> Drillable

Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) use the term “spreadable” to describe ways that content may be circulated actively via social media through a process that is partially shaped by top-down actions taken by professional media producers and partially by bottom-up choices made by individuals and grassroots communities pursuing their own goals. The Kony 2012 campaign, which depends on the interplay of a nonprofit organization and its loosely connected supporters, is a classic example of spreadable content. Jason Mittell (2013), however, introduced a second concept—drillability—to refer to the ways that new media’s database structures sometimes make it possible to drill deeper and develop a fuller understanding of media content and context. As Swartz (2012) notes in relation to IC, “The extent to which the group ‘raises awareness’ is largely dependent on how spreadable their message is. Drillability, on the other hand, describes the learning opportunities that exist beyond initial contact with the message. Both features are necessary for newcomers to become advocates of the cause” (11). The traits of a highly spreadable message may be different from those that ensure its drillability, though a coordinated transmedia campaign can achieve both.

Swartz not only finds that IC had been much more effective at achieving spreadability than drillability, but also warns that anyone who drilled deep into the IC site would find materials that could damage the organization; this proved to be the case when critics investigating the group dug up old photographs of the founders waving guns in Africa, learned more about the group’s ties to religious organizations (a theme never denied but not overtly raised in much of IC’s public-facing materials), and unearthed information that prompted questions about how the group raised and budgeted its money. Meanwhile, what they had difficulty finding was in-depth discussions of the complexities of the current political situation in Uganda and the Congo. While the IC-affiliated youth we spoke with generally defended the group as providing information sufficient to support their efforts, they also alluded to moments when they had to seek out information to defend the Kony 2012 campaign. In most cases, they argued the information was there if they looked deep enough. That said, IC did not necessarily invite such investigative practices. Rather it focused on brief, easily graspable messages useful for raising awareness and funds for the cause.

Amirah, a young British woman with Pakistani roots, discovered IC through the Kony 2012 campaign but was frustrated by the shutdown of the group’s website and by the ways that her usual news sources like the Guardian and the BBC were focusing almost entirely on critiques of the nonprofit rather than the issues IC was calling to the public’s attention. Watching the video with her father opened her eyes to a problem she had not known existed and provoked her to use her investigative skills to learn more about the situation online. Johnny, 19, had found Kony 2012 an effective starting point for discussions, and he became a point person inside his high school for the campaign as he tried to educate his cohort about the issues. He was frustrated, however, that many of them would allow a “rumor heard on Facebook” to color their whole perception of the movement, refusing to listen to the information he was painstakingly gathering.

After the fallout from Kony 2012, IC tried to address some of these issues by reorganizing and updating its website. Most of the updates focused on making the group’s guiding principles and activities more transparent. For example, IC’s “unconventional four-part model”—made up of media, mobilization, protection, and recovery activities—is now described in some detail. Visitors can also easily see how much of IC’s budget goes toward each of these areas. Clicking on the “LRA Crisis Tracker” tab takes the visitor to an interactive site that collates LRA updates from various sources to provide real-time information about defections, abductions, and other activities. Despite all these improvements, IC still provides few resources on the history of the conflict. Clicking on the “Conflict Overview” tab takes the visitor to a one-pager that contextualizes the conflict through brief introductions to Joseph Kony, displacement camps, the International Criminal Court, Juba Peace Talks, and Christmas Massacres, before ending with a update on the “LRA Today.” Those who want to “Dive Deeper” are then redirected to the “LRA Crisis Tracker.” (Meanwhile, IC’s robust and frequently updated blog is a crucial, but less easily searchable, repository for information on the violence in Uganda.) The lack of a more carefully curated repository of in-depth information and connections to other sources on the “Conflict Overview” page is quite telling. The page provides visitors with the sort of information they would need to quickly and accurately respond to basic questions but does virtually nothing to help them gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the conflict.

Top-Down <—> Bottom-Up

One consequence of IC’s focus on entertainment values has been a tendency to emphasize professional media making and top-down celebrity-supported efforts over the kinds of grassroots efforts we will see emerging from our other case studies. A vast majority of creative media production is handled by IC’s small, professional, and—in some ways—exclusive team. This centralized control over the production and circulation of media fits hand in glove with an organizational culture that is more hierarchical than that of most of the other groups we examine here. The IC leadership shifts back and forth between its desire to retain control over the group’s brand, messaging, and activities and its aim to incorporate diverse and participatory elements (which are to some degree responsible for IC’s appeal among young people). Over the years that we have studied IC, we have seen this balance tip in either direction.

On one side might be the “My IC story” initiative, which the organization created during the first Fourth Estate in 2011. “My IC Story” asked participants to craft a narrative of what IC means to them and why this personal connection is important. During breakout sessions, participants shared their own personal stories of how they became involved. The stories then went through several rounds of review and editing to fashion compelling versions the participants could share to help garner support (and raise funds) for IC. Usually, the group focused on finding the most emotionally compelling moment (e.g., “then my mother was diagnosed with cancer”) and asking the participant to get to it earlier or consider how it could be used more effectively. Peers then also suggested what parts of a story might be omitted if time was short (e.g., “if you only had one minute maybe you could open with talking about how much the film moved you when you first saw it”). After this feedback, the participants retold their stories, this time standing up to do so. After receiving at least one more round of comments, they took a few minutes to write their stories down in the journals they received at registration.

“My IC Story” was inspired by an unsolicited exchange on the Fourth Estate Facebook group page, where more than a hundred participants decided to introduce themselves in the weeks leading up to the event. In the end, youth were encouraged to record their stories and post them to their fundraising pages hosted on Invisible Children’s website. Leading up to the second Fourth Estate in 2013, the youth again introduced themselves prior to the event and were encouraged to create their own videos. But IC exerted more control over the process. They guided the discussion on the Facebook page, and, at times, the staff stepped in to censor discussions.

This focus on smoothing out the rough edges of the grassroots storytelling and media making reflects the organization’s desire to gain greater control over its messaging in the wake of the Kony 2012 firestorm, but the shift struck our team as ironic since, for us, what happened to IC during Kony 2012 was a product of the group’s long-standing tendency toward centralization. Having launched a campaign focused around grassroots efforts to circulate the video, the group’s leaders hunkered down when controversy struck. They lacked the capacity to communicate effectively with their dispersed supporters, who often had to confront local controversies on their own. Some of the other groups we study are much better prepared to deal with emergent responses, much more open to innovation from the edges, and much better able to regroup following a disruption of their communications infrastructure.

We observed a similar top-down versus bottom-up tension when we examined how IC tapped celebrity fandom to further its cause. IC has long recognized the visibility that celebrities can bring and has continued to add to its roster of prominent supporters over the years. At the time of writing, this list includes Oprah Winfrey, Harry Shum, Sophia Bush, Tom Shadyac, Jon Chu, and Kristen Bell, among others. IC celebrity supporters express their support for the group in various ways: they help spread IC campaigns through social media (according to Lotan’s chart, Bell was instrumental in spreading Kony 2012); they make appearances at IC events; they make sizeable donations and encourage others to do the same; and they also seek “product-placement” opportunities for the organization. In return, IC places its celebrity supporters on a pedestal that separates them from their less well-known supporters.

Our distinction here between top-down spectacle and participatory politics echoes another classic distinction in the literature around civic and political engagement—that between a public and an audience. Daniel Dayan (2005), for example, tells us that audiences are produced by acts of measurement, by the number of eyeballs attracted (as in the constant celebration of the number of people who watched Kony 2012) or in terms of the amount of money raised (another measure by which IC appraises its success). Publics, on the other hand, actively direct attention onto messages they value: “A public not only offers attention, it calls for attention” (44). A group cannot be meaningfully described as a public—or for that matter—participatory, if it lacks the ability to put issues on the table or if it lacks the collective capacity to deliberate and reach its own conclusions about the topics being considered. Publics, Sonia Livingstone (2005) argues, are “held to be collectivities, more than the sum of their parts, while audiences by contrast are merely aggregates of individuals” (25). From the start, IC has sought to build a strong sense of social connection between its members and increasingly, between U.S.-based participants and their counterparts in Africa. Yet, as the group adopts more spectator-driven models for its rallies, there is some risk that the affective ties will be stronger between individual members and the group’s leaders and celebrities than among dispersed members.

Lessons Learned from Kony 2012

One key assumption behind this book is that more participatory structures create a sense of belonging and solidarity within groups that are brought together less by geographic proximity than by shared interests and commitments. We see IC as an organization that seeks to tap the participatory impulses of its supporters to foster deeper commitments. Yet, as we’ve argued, for IC, maintaining and nurturing such participation has been, and continues to be, a struggle. On one hand, IC’s leaders recognize, and identify with, the participatory modes of engagement that drew many young people into the organization. They embrace innovative popular culture-inflected modes of civic engagement. In fact, most of IC’s leaders are only one or two steps removed from their millennial generation supporters. On the other hand, IC leaders now feel obligated to focus on achieving their goals in Africa, a priority that steers the organization away from actively supporting and encouraging meaningful youth participation. If Kony 2012 forced IC to “grow up,” then growing up for IC has meant a deepening tension between its participatory modes of engaging youth and more traditional top-down approaches. Youth are becoming audiences for rather than participants in creating IC media.

While there is much about IC that still encourages a sense of participation, including a reliance on grassroots circulation and an emphasis on the language of remix culture, IC increasingly operates more like a traditional political organization. However, our interviews with IC supporters also confirmed that the young people involved with the group did (at least at one point in its history) feel a significant sense of ownership over its messages and saw themselves as belonging to the community that formed around its media production and circulation. IC is best understood through the lens of paradoxes that emerge out of these negotiations. Though particular to IC in many ways, we can learn much about participatory politics by grappling with these paradoxes. For one, they point to generational shifts in what politics looks like and how it is practiced. These paradoxes also prompt us to recognize the important role that popular culture and entertainment can play in mobilizing youth.

At the time of this writing, IC’s future direction remains unclear as it undergoes a series of very substantial organizational changes. In January 2014, confronting a large shortfall in its fundraising (ironically attributable to the public perception that the group had become rich and powerful in the wake of Kony 2012), IC announced that it was cutting back many of the community-building activities we discuss here, including outreach to youth through schools. Instead, as some of their critics had advocated, IC would focus its efforts on ending the LRA conflict. As Noelle West explained in an interview with BuzzFeed (Testa 2014), “We don’t need the masses, the gigantic grassroots movement, as much as we have in the past.” In its messaging, IC expressed an ongoing commitment to supporting its youth, but on a much less dedicated level. For the many IC staffers who joined the group because of its appeal to youth, the decision to refocus on institutional efforts has been painful. As a consequence of the shift, IC’s grassroots youth base has substantially diminished. There was a much scaled-back Fourth Estate in August 2014, which brought together 40 of the group’s most committed youth supporters. As in previous years, this Fourth Estate also focused on sharing information about IC programs, but in a much more intimate and low-key setting that felt more like a gathering of friends and family than a formal event.

In December 2014, after continued downsizing at the San Diego headquarters, IC made another, this time more decisive, announcement, declaring that it would shut down all of its U.S. operations at the end of the year. In an open letter addressed to supporters on the group’s website, IC’s leadership explained:

So based on our current financial projections, we have decided that the best decision is to shut down the media and mass-awareness efforts in the U.S. and to focus all remaining funds (and future fundraising) on the execution of our most essential programs. We will also be handing off ownership of our Ugandan programs and offices to regional partners. Because of this decision, things are going to look a lot different. We won’t be visiting your school in vans, and we won’t be making new videos or selling T-shirts. We won’t be hosting major awareness events, benefit concerts, or grassroots fundraisers. Invisible Children will be moving out of our San Diego office and the majority of our staff will be let go, including our current executive staff.

In its youth-facing messaging, IC struck a less final note, stressing that there would still be ways for young people to stay involved, particularly if they wanted to be part of IC’s Washington, D.C., efforts through Resolve (resolve.org), IC’s long-term lobbying partner. Still, the announcement signaled that an era of Invisible Children was ending. Russell encouraged young supporters to sustain their commitment to “changing the world” and to continue to use the skills, friendships, networks, and experiences acquired through IC to achieve their goals.

Within a few hours of IC’s announcement, a flurry of youth-generated blog posts, YouTube videos, and Tumblr posts reacted to the news, with many of the posters reflecting about what involvement with IC and its community had meant to their lives. An article published in Medium by Matt Scott Crum (2014), a self-identified IC millennial, exemplified the tone of most of these expressions:

IC has contributed an important part to the rising of a new generation of activists and leaders; people that were not loyal to just Invisible Children but awoke to a variety of types of injustices and became inspired and dedicated to do something about something. On my college campus alone, I can personally name a sizable group of students who altered their careers to be able to fight injustice in some way who got their start, their original passion, from Invisible Children’s content.

As if to confirm this sentiment, a core group of Fourth Estate alumni quickly launched “Fourth Estate—The Next Chapter,” a Facebook group dedicated to finding ways to harness IC’s youth energy into networked activities that would sustain the movement after IC shuts down. As the group continues to brainstorm next steps, it is also actively fundraising for IC’s final (and, by previous standards, modest) campaign to raise $150,000 to support its “most vital programs in the counter-LRA mission through 2015.” At the time of writing, it is unclear whether and how this fledgling participatory post-IC movement will evolve. But if the fact that they managed to meet and exceed their fundraising goal within a matter of days is an indicator of momentum, then we might be seeing interesting developments among IC supporters in the months to come.

Regardless of whether a clearly defined post-IC youth movement emerges, the organization’s approach to mobilizing youth will likely live on as supporter and staff alumni continue to apply skills they acquired through IC to other contexts. We already see IC staff moving into positions at other nonprofits (like Giving Keys and To Write Love on Her Arms), corporate startups, and educational initiatives. We also see them applying IC’s approach to storytelling as a catalyst for social change to other causes. As these individuals continue to connect to each other through social media, we expect to see an increasingly more self-aware, loosely networked IC-inspired community of youth leaders take shape.

IC’s decision in 2014 to prioritize its overseas goals over supporting its youth base—and its ultimate decision to let young supporters move on—distinguishes it from the groups in our other case studies, for whom youth engagement is central, not tangential, to their existence. Chapter 3 will reveal how a multiple-issue-based approach—rather than a narrow, single-mission focus—can strengthen and sustain grassroots support. As IC’s senior leadership readily admits, IC’s youth-engagement strategy was an unintended byproduct of its efforts to end the plight of the night commuters that Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laren Poole met during their first trip to Uganda. Over a decade, IC struggled and experimented with different approaches to achieve this. Along the way, they inspired tens of thousands of young people to participate. As he reflects on IC’s early days, Russell laughs, “We were naive. We were stupid. We thought we could end a war.” Elaborating on this sentiment, a former IC staff member posted this comment on her Facebook page in response to the news IC shared in December 2014:

You know how people ask “how are you feeling?” And you’re like “I’m fine.” But you’re really not fine? It’s a heartbreaking feeling to watch a beautiful thing you poured your blood sweat and tears into sail off into the sunset. I could rattle off stats about the natural life cycle of a business or that all good things must come to an end, but for some reason this article got me. Sure, mistakes were made at IC. Sure, we “got lucky” far more times than we deserved. But we also gathered together the most generous and idealistic and incredible humans for a genuinely important cause. We weren’t scammers or slacktivists or white saviors or getting rich. We just REALLY were that genuine and REALLY trying that hard.

With the organization now likely closing its doors for good within the year, it will be up to its young supporters to decide what defines IC’s long-term legacy for youth and participatory politics.