Philip Ellefson (The Beacon)
By Philip Ellefson, Staff Commentary
One day, my newsfeed was plastered with the video "Kony 2012" and statuses saying things like "Kony must be punished for his crimes. #kony2012." The next day, all I saw on Facebook was a hoard of people decrying the video and calling Invisible Children an illegitimate organization.
The explosion and subsequent backlash against "Kony 2012" illustrate two important truths about social media. First, the Internet can be used to spread awareness and activism across the world in a matter of hours. Second, people are even more eager to jump on bandwagons than we previously thought.
The problem is that in the Information Age, when countless data are sent across the world every second, we haven't yet learned to filter, examine and analyze the information we're exposed to on the Internet. A couple of decades ago, editors and publishers made it more difficult (although by no means impossible) for false or illegitimate information to be published. Now, anyone can make a film or write a story and expose tens of millions of people to it through various forms of social media. We all need to be editors. We all need to be fact-checkers, researchers and, above all, thinkers.
Really, the rapid spread of "Kony 2012" is absurd. Because of the Internet, virtually all of the accumulated knowledge of humankind is now at our fingertips. Yet, for a brief period of time we were so fixated upon this one 30-minute video that we forgot about all of the other information out there. It would seem that the abundance of facts would make us more rational and critical of what we see. Ironically, however, we latched on to this one tear-jerking documentary and took it as true, when in less than five minutes we could have learned that Invisible Children was already a controversial organization and that Kony was no longer active in Uganda when the video was made.
The whole situation got a lot worse for Invisible Children when Jason Russell, the creator of "Kony 2012," had a mental breakdown and was found exhausted and dehydrated, vandalizing cars and making sexual gestures (or masturbating, according to some accounts). After this incident, we again see a lack of reasonability on the Internet. While there are plenty of legitimate arguments against the Kony movement, Russell's lewdness is not one of them. To discredit the film and its mission on the grounds of Russell's actions is a blatant ad hominem fallacy and has no place in serious discussion of the issue.
This, too, is a problem of the Internet. There are innumerable forums for debate on the Web, but for the most part they are filled with people using poor rhetoric and emotionally charged arguments (and with Internet trolls, who are certainly not helping at all). Besides an inability to be critical of information, we also have to deal with the problem of figuring out how to argue rationally on the Internet.
So what do I think of "Kony 2012" and Invisible Children? I will not tell you, because passively accepting my opinion is just as bad as passively accepting "Kony 2012" as true. We all need to get online and find out for ourselves what we think of the video and the movement, whether Invisible Children is trustworthy, whether military intervention is the best course of action against Joseph Kony, whether the U.S. has any place in Uganda at all. Do not just watch a video. Check facts, use reason and be Internet-literate.
The Internet is young, and we are just learning to use it. Our generation has the potential to turn the web into anything we want. So let's turn it into something constructive and helpful, a way to share information but also to analyze it. Think, use reason and Facebook on.
