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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes Join My Village (JMV), an NGO–corporation partnership that aims to “break down barriers of culture and geography” using the “power of online communities.” JMV uses Web 2.0 technologies to entice online users in the USA to engage with content about women’s lives in Malawi. Each time a user clicks on JMV content, the corporate partners donate money to the NGO. Using discourse analysis and interviews, I examine how JMV encourages users to care about distant others and with what effects. I draw attention to the use of Web 2.0 in the campaign in terms of how distant others become entangled in social media users’ everyday lives and the types of engagement JMV encourages. I conclude that while JMV offers some possibilities for caring-at-a-distance, the contradictory messaging and the corporate aspects of the campaign need more critical analysis.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this research, to Stewart Gibson and Amy Kipp for research assistance, to CRA members (Jennifer Silver, Kate Parizeau, Jaclyn Cockburn and Noella Gray) for support and encouragement with this piece and to the special issue editors and reviewers for helpful and supportive feedback on previous versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 “Frequently Asked Questions,” available online at: www.joinmyvillage.com/faq.
2 “Innovative Online Community Launched at Clinton Global Initiative Will Fight Poverty in Africa,” PRNewswire (September 23, 2009), available online at: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/innovative-online-community-launched-at-clinton-global-initiative-will-fight-poverty-in-africa-60733952.html.
3 “General Mills, CARE and Country Music Star Lee Ann Womack Join Forces to Fight Poverty in Africa Through JoinMyVillage.com,” Business Wire (December 13, 2010), available online at: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101213006877/en/General-Mills-CARE-Country-Music-Star-Lee.
4 Lisa Ann Richey (ed.), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power (New York, NY, Routledge, 2015); Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte, “New Actors and Alliances in Development,” Third World Quarterly 35:1 (2014), pp. 1–21.
5 Roberta Hawkins, “A New Frontier in Development? The Use of Cause-Related Marketing by International Development Organizations,” Third World Quarterly 33:10 (2012), pp. 1783–801; Linsey McGoey, “The Philanthropic State: Market–State Hybrids in the Philanthrocapitalist Turn,” Third World Quarterly 35:1 (2014), pp. 109–25; Chizu Sato, “Two Frontiers of Development?: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Public-Private Partnerships for Women’s Empowerment,” International Political Sociology 10:2 (2016), pp. 150–67.
6 Amy Kipp and Roberta Hawkins, “The Responsibilization of ‘Development Consumers’ Through Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns,” Consumption, Markets and Culture (2018); Richey and Ponte, “New Actors and Alliances.”
7 Bram Büscher, “Conservation and Development 2.0: Intensifications and Disjunctures in the Politics of Online ‘Do-Good’ Platforms,” Geoforum 79 (2017), pp. 163–73; Johannes Von Engelhardt and Jeroen Jansz, “Challenging Humanitarian Communication: An Empirical Exploration of Kony 2012,” International Communication Gazette 76:6 (2014), pp. 464–84.
8 Lisa Ann Richey and Lilie Chouliaraki (eds), “Everyday Humanitarianism: Ethics, Affects and Practices,” New Political Science 39:2 (2017), pp. 314–16.
9 Clive Barnett and David Land, “Geographies of Generosity: Beyond the ‘Moral Turn,’” Geoforum 38:6 (2007), pp. 1065–75; Lilie Chouliaraki, “‘Improper Distance’: Towards a Critical Account of Solidarity as Irony,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14:4 (2011), pp. 363–81; John Silk, “Caring at a Distance: Gift Theory, Aid Chains and Social Movements,” Social & Cultural Geography 5:2 (2004), pp. 229–51; David M. Smith, “How Far Should We Care? On the Spatial Scope of Beneficence,” Progress in Human Geography 22:1 (1998), pp. 15–38.
10 I use the term “JMV users” instead of audience to try to emphasize the fact that they are not just consuming information but are also able to produce it (for example, comment) and react to it (for example, like and share).
11 For some examples see Mette Mortensen and Hans-Jörg Trenz (eds), “Global Moral Spectatorship in the Age of Social Media,” Javnost – The Public Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 23:4 (2016), pp. 343-62.
12 Chris Addison, “Web 2.0: A New Chapter in Development in Practice?” Development in Practice 16:6 (2006), pp. 623–27.
13 Von Engelhardt and Jansz, “Challenging Humanitarian Communication.”
14 Bram Büscher, Stasja Koot, and Ingrid L. Nelson, “Introduction. Nature 2.0: New Media, Online Activism and the Cyberpolitics of Environmental Conservation,” Geoforum 79 (2016), pp. 111–13.
15 Ibid.
16 Büscher, “Conservation and Development 2.0”; Elizabeth Lunstrum, “Feed Them to the Lions: Conservation Violence Goes Online,” Geoforum 79 (2017), pp. 134–43.
17 Bram Büscher, “Nature 2.0: Exploring and Theorizing the Links Between New Media and Nature Conservation,” New Media & Society 18:5 (2016), pp. 726–43; Melissa Checker, “Stop FEMA Now: Social Media, Activism and the Sacrificed Citizen,” Geoforum 79 (2017), pp. 124–33.
18 Roberta Hawkins and Jennifer J. Silver, “From Selfie to #Sealfie: Nature 2.0 and the Digital Cultural Politics of an Internationally Contested Resource,” Geoforum 79 (2017), pp. 114–23.
19 Lauren O’Neil, “UNICEF Strikes Back Against Slacktivism: ‘Likes Don’t Save Lives’” CBC News (2013), available online at: http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/05/unicef-strikes-back-against-slacktivism-likes-dont-save-lives.html.
20 Henrik Serup Christensen, “Political Activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or Political Participation by Other Means?” First Monday 16:2 (2011), available online at: http://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3336.
21 Evgeny Morozov, “From Slacktivism to Activism,” Foreign Policy 5 (September 2009), available online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/05/from-slacktivism-to-activism/.
22 Von Engelhardt and Jansz, “Challenging Humanitarian The Atlantic Communication.”
23 Teju Cole, “The White Saviour Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic (March 21, 2012), available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/; David Meek, “YouTube and Social Movements: A Phenomenological Analysis of Participation, Events and Cyberplace,” Antipode 44:4 (2012), pp. 1429–48; Zeynep Tufekci, “#Kony2012, Understanding Networked Symbolic Action & Why Slacktivism is Conceptually Misleading Technosociology,” (2012), available online at: http://technosociology.org/?p=904.
24 Tufekci, “#Kony2012.”
25 Zeynep Tufekci, “Kony 2012 and the Value of Global Discussion,” New York Times (March 10, 2012), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/09/kony-2012-and-the-potential-of-social-media-activism/kony-2012-and-the-value-of-a-global-discussion.
26 Barnett and Land, “Geographies of Generosity”; David Smith, Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Doreen Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86:1 (2004), pp. 5–18.
27 Chouliaraki, “Improper Distance.”
28 Smith, “How Far Should We Care?”
29 Smith, Moral Geographies.
30 Parvati Raghuram, Clare Madge, and Pat Noxolo, “Rethinking Responsibility and Care for a Postcolonial World,” Geoforum 40:1 (2009), pp. 5–13.
31 Raghuram et al., “Rethinking Responsibility.”
32 Stuart Corbridge, “Marxisms, Modernities, and Moralities: Development Praxis and the Claims of Distant Strangers,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:4 (1993), pp. 449–72.
33 See Raymond L. Bryant and Michael K. Goodman, “Consuming Narratives: The Political Ecology of ‘Alternative’ Consumption,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29:3 (2004), pp. 344–66.
34 Michael K. Goodman, “The Mirror of Consumption: Celebritization, Developmental Consumption and the Shifting Cultural Politics of Fair Trade,” Geoforum 41:1 (2010), pp. 104–16.
35 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility.”
36 Jonathan Darling, “Thinking Beyond Place: The Responsibilities of a Relational Spatial Politics,” Geography Compass 3:5 (2009), pp. 1938–54.
37 Raghuram et al., “Rethinking Responsibility,” p. 8.
38 Parvati Raghuram, “Locating Care Ethics Beyond the Global North,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15:3 (2016), pp. 511–33.
39 Since completing the data collection for this article, JMV has expanded again to include the corporate partner Cargill (and no longer includes Merck) and to include projects in Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana while continuing work in India and Malawi.
40 “Join My Village Launches in India to Support Women and Girls through CARE,” Business Wire (February 28, 2012), available online at: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120228006451/en/Join-Village-Launches-India-Support-Women-Girls.
41 At the time of my research Twitter was not as popular with JMV users and so was excluded from the analysis.
42 All data was accessed in 2013 at: www.joinmyvillage.com or https://www.facebook.com/joinmyvillage/.
43 Although discourse about projects in Malawi and India were analyzed, in this article I focus on Malawi to narrow the scope.
44 For example, see Raghuram et al., “Rethinking Responsibility.”
45 Darling, “Thinking Beyond Place,” p. 1946.
46 Michael A. DeVito, “From Editors to Algorithms: A Values-Based Approach to Understanding Story Selection in the Facebook News Feed,” Digital Journalism 5:6 (2017), pp. 753–73.
47 Tufecki, “#Kony2012.”
48 Hawkins and Silver, “From Selfie to #Sealfie.”
49 This practice was explicitly denied in interviews with JMV Representatives.
50 See Büscher, “Conservation and Development 2.0.”
51 For example, Raghuram et al., “Rethinking Responsibility.”
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Roberta Hawkins
Roberta Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. Her research examines the ways in which people, places and natures in the Global North and the Global South are connected (or not) through understandings and practices of development.