KONY 2012 viral video inspires student group

The KONY 2012 video cannonballed into a sea of avid Facebook users, and the ripples quickly rocked the web with “likes” and “shares.” It went viral March 5, but its backsplash has left the public mind swimming.

The wake could carry a boatload of IU students to the “Cover the Night” event in April, but the waves of excitement that the video inspired are crashing together, leaving inspired students and Invisible Children IU members lost in a churning sea of confusion.

Invisible Children-IU President Morgan Conway said she just wants everyone to calm down.

“Instead of all of us working against each other, we need to come together and calm down so we can get something done,” she said.

Spring break provided a hiatus for those closest to the movement, and Conway said she hopes it gave those passionate about KONY 2012 a chance to debrief. Heading into April, she said her main objective is to foster an informative presence on campus.

Two weeks ago, Invisible Children co-founder and filmmaker Jason Russell released the 29-minute video launching the KONY 2012 campaign, a cinematic push to raise awareness about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.

Russell said in the video he has dedicated his adult life to rebuilding the war-torn country Kony terrorized for 25 years. In 2003 he and two filmmaker peers traveled to Africa and produced the documentary “Invisible Children: Rough Cut” two years later as a result of their trip. In 2006 he founded the nonprofit Invisible Children.

Each year the organization brands itself with a theme, and KONY 2012 is this year’s annual campaign slogan. Its message has been the same for six years: Take down Joseph Kony. But this time, its delivery made the difference.

Twitter introduced IU freshman Joey Montgomery to Joseph Kony.

A friend tweeted the video link to Montgomery. He thought the School of Public and Environmental Affairs student would find it interesting.     

On the night the video was released, Montgomery created the Facebook group KONY2012 Indiana University. He added 15-20 of his peers, hoping they would join him and get something started at IU. When he woke up Tuesday morning, the group had more than 300 members.

It hasn’t stopped growing since. Now with 558 members, Montgomery’s page is the unofficial IU KONY 2012 page.     

At first he was overwhelmed. He didn’t even know that Invisible Children sponsored the KONY 2012 campaign, let alone that there was an IU affiliate on campus. Montgomery eventually crossed paths via Facebook with Conway, and the two formed an alliance.

“I said to Morgan, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot of people here. Help,’” Montgomery said.
Conway, a senior Environmental Management major, said she was involved with Invisible Children before it was a fad. Since high school, Conway said she has been passionate about the organization and now serves as IC-IU president. IC-IU coordinated a film screening for KONY 2012 February 29. When it hit the web March 5, she said she had no idea the world would respond with such enthusiasm.

She hadn’t planned to create a Facebook event for “Cover the Night” until after spring break, but she couldn’t control the power of the Internet.

“Tuesday hit and it was pandemonium,” she said. “People didn’t realize KONY 2012 was from Invisible Children.”

So with the help of Montgomery, she started reaching out to the different Facebook initiatives. The group wanted to consolidate the KONY 2012 IU fan page and the five event pages under one umbrella.

“We all need to come from the same place,” Conway said.
Invisible Children critics claim the video is misleading and that it casts the historically complex tale of Joseph Kony through a simple lens: the eyes of Russell’s 5-year-old son.

Associate professor of journalism and African studies faculty member Jim Kelly said there are two central criticisms of the video: accuracy and perspective.

“First and foremost, the video, despite its title, leaves the impression somehow that the Lord’s Resistance Army is still active in Uganda. It’s not. The Ugandan army and people defeated the LRA about five years ago,” Kelly said. “In that respect I think it’s fair to say that it’s inaccurate.”

Kelly last visited Uganda in 2007. He said the second major discrepancy is how IC portrayed its message.

“To be inaccurately informed is to be deceived. A call to military intervention has to be made from accurate knowledge, not emotionally charged views,” Kelly said. “It decreases the value of the message to the audience. I think that the long-held assumption is that works of fiction are labeled as fiction and works of non-fiction ought to contain accurate and verifiable truth.”

But Kelly made it clear that Joseph Kony and the LRA were horrendous and caused untold strife to the Ugandan people.

But Russell couldn’t take the criticism and was arrested and hospitalized Thursday by San Diego police for masturbating in public and vandalizing cars. According to the Los Angeles Times, Russell’s family said he snapped under the pressure.

Conway and Montgomery are handling the nay-sayers, too.

They said they know KONY 2012 is a trend, just like any political campaign.
“People have been damaging the campaign, but they don’t understand that’s the whole point of the documentary,” Conway said. “It’s definitely a trend, and I’m OK with that.

The point of the documentary was very well-achieved. People now know who Kony is.”
She said throughout the years IC’s campaigns have informed but not inspired. This year it did.

“(The Internet) makes it instantly available, it makes it free, whenever, however, wherever,” said Al Tompkins, senior faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “The distribution is just vital to the success of this project.”

Montgomery said he understands that criticism is part of the process.

“To anyone who wants to criticize, the facts are out there,” he said. “Any movement that catches on like this, a sensational movement, there is going to be those who criticize because it caught on so fast.”

And it did catch on fast. The video has had 82,115,079 hits on Youtube as of Sunday night, and Conway said in just one day she had 60 requests from students to be added to the IC-IU email list-serve.            

“It goes against many of the conventions that journalists assume to be true, and one of them is that young people won’t watch a long piece,” Tompkins said.

He said it is important for the audience, including government officials, to observe this movement and others like it with a questioning eye.

“I’m glad that people pay attention to these things, that people care about what is going on in the world around them,” he said. “I just hope movements like this won’t spark the government to act without really thinking.”

In Bloomington, it is more than 50 student organizations and additional local businesses that have quickly jumped on board. Conway said she is amazed by the amount of support KONY 2012 has brought her once small club.

Conway and Montgomery will join forces for a KONY 2012 callout meeting at 8 p.m. Monday night in SPEA 169.

From an outsider looking in, Tompkins said he is interested to see how this movement will unfold globally once April rolls around.

“Backlash is good because it keeps the subject alive, both the original story and the reaction to the story. I’d be a lot more worried if there was no critical thinking about this,” he said. “They have to come to terms with what they think about it, but the thing is they never stop thinking about it.”