Kony 2012: narrative strategies of a phenomenon of digital activism

Abstract

In March 2012 the Kony 2012 campaign was launched, whose main instrument was a 29-minute film by the NGO Invisible Children. It is about a mobilization campaign whose purpose is to locate and arrest Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA (Lord's Army Resistance), a militant group operating in central Africa accused of a series of crimes against humanity. The sheer popularity of an activist film on the internet has prompted us to think about what strategies were used by its producers and the effects of the campaign. In order to do so, we start from this consideration of the significance of several fragments of videos taken from Youtube and used as basic pieces of the construction of the film Kony 2012. In sequence, based on its decupagem * 1, the way is pursued the film reveals latent political meanings in those micro-videos. Starting from the idea of the film as a moment within a complex process of construction, dispute and negotiation of an imagined digital community, we will see that the film and the practices around it propose a global policy, built from myths and utopias, that poses at the same time young, postmodern and digital. It elicits responses from existing practice in this new agora, which has proved to be highly manipulable and, not without paradox, highly critical.