WTF was Kony 2012? Considerations for Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (CCCS)

Abstract

This article discusses the (in)famous Kony 2012 (Kony) viral video, which had a record-100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viral advocacy video by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony “famous.” Theorizing Kony's eventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural studies, which note the obsolescence of past critical trends in CCCS: especially regarding virality, imitation, attention, affect, citizenship, subjectivity, power, control, participation, and protest.

Keywords:

• Kony 2012
• Virality
• Attention
• Participation
• Power
• Cultural Theory

The author would like to thank Jack Bratich and Darrin Hicks for valuable exchanges on issues of power, affect, circulation, agency and motivation that contributed to the positions he's taken here.

Notes

[1] Time Magazine voted Kony top viral video of 2012 (Gangnam Style was second). Kony remains the most viral video to date by some standards (number of views in a short amount of time), though Gangnam now has more total views, http://entertainment.time.com/2012/12/04/top-10-arts-lists/slide/kony-2012/

[2] David L. Paletz, The Media in American Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2002), 178. Handfuls of advocacy guides say it, too. For example, see http://www.care.org/getinvolved/advocacy/tools.asp

[3] Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

[4] James Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Psychology Press, 1989).

[5] Russell, Jason. Kony 2012. Documentary, Short, Biography, Crime, History, News, War, N-A.

[6] Russell, “Kony 2012,” March 9, 2012.

[7] Andrew Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). Daniel Drezner, “Foreign Policy Goes Glam.” The National Interest, Nov/Dec 2007: 22–28. Lisa Tsaliki, Christos A. Frangonikolopoulos and Asteris Huliaras, Transnational Celebrity Activism in Global Politics: Changing the World? (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011).

[8] “StoryGuide Home”; Kate Murphy, “How to Make Your Video Go Viral,” The New York Times, February 13, 2013, sec. Technology/Personal Tech, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/technology/personaltech/how-to-make-your-video-go-viral.html.

[9] Jayson Harsin. “That's Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs, and Primary Definers.” Accessed March 7, 2013, http://flowtv.org/2010/10/thats-democratainment/.

[10] “Jason Russell Addresses the Video of His Public Breakdown—Video—@OWNTV.” Oprah.com. Accessed March 7, 2013, http://www.oprah.com/common/omplayer_embed.html?article_id=39619.

[11] Nick Couldry, “Media Meta-capital: Extending the Range of Bourdieus Field Theory.” Theory and Society 32, no. 5–6 (2003): 653–77.

[12] David Morley, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1986).

[13] Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010); Jayson Harsin, “Public Argument in the New Media Ecology,” Argumentation in Context. October (2013), pages to be assigned.

[14] Gabriel Tarde, L'opinion et la foule (Paris: F. Alcan, 1904), 15.

[15] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, (London: Polity Press, 2012).

[16] “What's So Special About Mirror Neurons? ∣ Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.” Accessed March 13, 2013, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/11/06/whats-so-special-about-mirror-neurons/; “Monkey See, Monkey Do? The Role of Mirror Neurons in Human Behavior—Association for Psychological Science.” Accessed March 13, 2013, http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/monkey-see-monkey-do-the-role-of-mirror-neurons-in-human-behavior.html.

[17] Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (December 5, 2007): 295–317.

[18] Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology's Gift,” Body & Society 16, no. 1 (3–1, 2010): 29–56.

[19] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

[20] See Cottle's discussion of media ritual, including the work on media events as “salient or obtrude in terms of high-level media exposure and collective media performativity across different media outlets in space and time. Cottle pushes scholars to pay attention to whether media events as rituals are affirming or disruptive of social order. Obviously the Zizekian position would vote “affirming.” However, there is an unpredictability to effects of such media events-as-rituals. Simon Cottle, “Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent.” Media, Culture & Society 28, no. 3 (May 1, 2006): 416.

[21] James Hay, “Popular Culture in a Critique of the New Political Reason.” Cultural Studies 25, no. 4–5 (2011): 659–84; Harsin, “That's Democratainment.”

[22] Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. “Protocol, Control, and Networks.” Grey Room (2004): 6–29.

[23] Zizek in Mark Fisher, Capitalism Realism (London: Zero Books, 2011), 17.

[24] Michael Benton, “Dialogic: Michael Hardt: On the Politics of Love.” Dialogic, December 19, 2004, http://dialogic.blogspot.com/2004/12/michael-hardt-on-politics-of-love.html.

[25] See, for example, Tony Sampson, Virality, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Bernard Stiegler, Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon, Culture Machine, 13 (2012); and the special issue of History of the Human Sciences, “Neuroscience, Power and Culture,” February 2010; 23 (1). Edited by Scott Vrecko, featuring important articles by Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose.

[26] Benton, “Dialogic.”

[27] Mark Fisher, Capitalism Realism, 31.

[28] Westen, The Political Brain.

[29] See “That's Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs, and Primary Definers” Flow.

[30] Kevin and Kelly, “Tracing the Everyday' sitings’ of Adolescents on the Internet.”