Kony2012, by now all of you know or have heard of the Kony2012 viral video and its subsequent backlash and public humiliation of its filmmaker Jason Russell. Now before you jump on the for or against Kony bandwagon let me make clear this is not what this blog is about.
Like many of you I too participated in the spread of this video. I too had the infamous knee jerk reaction to its carefully edited albeit overly simplified humanitarian message and I hit the share button. I believe in the effort to raise awareness and the subsequent upsurge of youth joining forces to unite and actively participate in grassroots activism. By hitting the share button I too felt positive about helping be part of the catalyst to spread awareness of human rights violations occurring in Uganda. However, once I sat back and saw the surge in popularity of this video, It made me ask myself, besides this video what do most if not all of us really know what is actually going on in this foreign country? Have any of us done any research so that we maybe better informed to make an informed decision to participate in spreading awareness concerning an individual we virtually don't know anything about. The answer was no, we hadn't.
Is Joeseph Kony a bad person, by all accounts and purposes, yes he is. Will simply getting rid of him fix all of the issues surrounding the violence and abuse being orchestrated by the LRA, no it will not. The issues going on in Uganda and now the Congo are very complex. A virtual civil war has been raging in this country for many years, how do I know this, I did some research.
The landscape of journalism and media has forever been altered due to the onslaught of the Internet and the subsequent ever reaching popularity of social media. We no longer rely on newspapers or news stations to get our world news, no we log onto Facebook and Twitter to do that. This has become a double edged sword. The instantaneousness of information is amazing and plentiful. However, how much is too much? We are constantly being bombarded with information and images that our attention spans have dwindled to almost nothing, if you don't get my attention in a few seconds, I'm moving on. It is almost like we have become numb, we actively try to filter out only the information that we assume pertains to us and ignore those that do not. Secondly, many if not almost all of us casually press send/share to videos and links and photos that are posted on social media outlets, without actively viewing them in their entirety, innocently believing them to be true without any verification to its authenticity. Where has our critical thinking gone? Many of us just accept things at face value as truth, after all if it's on the Internet it must be true right?
Consequently, you and I are now becoming the "journalists" of society, yet we are not held to the same level of ethical standards as actual journalists are. So I beg the question, should we be held to same journalistic standards and if we break these should we be held accountable just as a journalist would? It is an interesting quandary. We live in a society where there in essence are no safety nets shielding and sifting through the garbage to reveal to us to what the actual "truth' is. Are we equipped as individuals to do that job on our own? I think we are, ONLY if we are prepared to do the work, ie research to find it. It clearly seems we are living in a Brave New World, doesn't it. xxxoo
