Social Conscience Media 2.0

Unless you’ve been suffered the terrible and heart wrenching loss of all internet and media communication for the last few weeks, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the Kony 2012 campaign instigated by the Invisible Children group. Along I’ve seen countless Facebook, Twitter and online news articles trying to convince me to support this month’s “it” thing by signing petitions, donating to different charity groups or just sharing different YouTube or Vimeo videos.
In a matter of 12 days since it’s viral release on March 5th, the Kony 2012 video created by “Invisible Children” has received approximately 80 million hits on YouTube – not to mention the millions of other views on associated videos. Clearly this mass marketing at its finest; you couldn’t ask for a better target audience.

While I would love to throw out my many opinions on this Kony campaign issue (and trust me there are many) I would instead like to link this issue to my assessment and JOUR1111 course content; albeit slightly late! In our second lecture we discussed the changing use of web in society, from the traditional 1.0 information web, to the 2.0 new media “social” web and coming into the 3.0 semantic web.

Obviously there is no better current example than Kony 2012 to highlight the extent of connectedness in the 2.0 social web. Think about it, Kony and his guerrilla group “The Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA) have been abducting children as sex-slaves and warriors since 1986, but most people until last week hadn’t even heard of him. Even in 2005 Kony’s actions should have become world news when he was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) – but sadly it wasn’t until September 2006 that Facebook was open to anyone who wanted an account, and it wasn’t until August 2008 that Facebook had the capacity to branch out to its first 100 million users.  

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that there is now mass awareness of the atrocities that have been committed in Uganda and, from extrapolation, the numerous other crimes against humanity in the surrounding African nations. It’s just sad to think that if we had had this connectedness beforehand, and hence the pressure on governments to intervene in these states, that the lives of so many people could have been saved or free from torment.

Though this raises another question from our lecture, would we be willing to pay for this information? While for the most part we were discussing high-end newspapers restricting access to their online content to paying customers only, would we be so socially aware if we had to pay for out 2.0 media devices?

I know I would certainly reconsider my Facebook and Twitter accounts if faced with the idea of having to pay for it. As such, I would miss out on all the latest social-media trends and undoubtedly be on the back foot with knowing what the latest “it” topic is – well at least until the old media caught up with the hype. Thankfully though, for the time being, Facebook’s 845+ million active users can enjoy their free access to the social media news.

At least that’s one good thing that’s come out of our entitlement to free social media, the governments are forced to listen to the masses – just like my tutor is forced to read this terrible blog!