By Any Media Necessary. Henry Jenkins
organization “is really good about having different campaigns” that offer multiple ways to participate and many points for potential engagement that might begin, for instance, with attending an IC screening and grow over time. The bucket list of IC-related activities the youth described included organizing local IC events (often designed to be celebratory in tone), creating their own media to recruit members for local clubs, using social media to maintain support, setting up information tables at their local school or college, designing T-shirts, fundraising toward specific IC goals, and even interning or touring with IC. To Janelle, who was interning with IC at the time of her interview, the key to IC’s success with young people is their “youthful, hip vibe,” which she attributed to the fact that “everyone in the boardroom is 30 years and younger.” As Stephanie reflected on her IC experience, she also appreciated the support and advice she received in running her local club as IC’s responsive staff helped her navigate various logistical and organizational challenges.
Over time, IC supported more explicit political lobbying efforts. For example Jack, a college sophomore, described the ways that IC had enabled him to directly contact Senate staffers during a visit to Washington:
The fact that the staff members of a senator could actually listen to a 17-year-old was pretty amazing.… [IC does] a very good job of preparing us.… The lobbying meetings I’ve attended in the last few years have been based around specific legislation or resolutions that they’re seeking to pass or, you know, stuff like that. So you get a point of contact from the office and then they send us—they put together, you know, guides, very detailed guides, for both the lobby people leaders and, then, if you have first-time lobby members in your group, they have specific guides for them. And they detail everything from what you should wear to a meeting to what you should talk about.
Jillian, a 22-year-old from Pennsylvania, similarly described the ways that IC provided her and her classmates with the scaffolding they needed to deal directly with their elected officials. She noted that the IC staff members would often call to debrief with her team on what worked or didn’t after a meeting took place. The tendency to reduce Invisible Children to a 30-minute video undervalues the much broader array of media tactics the group deploys. Similarly, the idea that this movement depends primarily on short-term reactions to rapidly spreading content underestimates the number of young people who have participated in afterschool organizations, been trained by the roadies who travel the country showing IC films and leading workshops with supporters, gathered for massive scale public protests, attended one of the Fourth Estate conferences, or flown to Washington to lobby government officials.
Clicktivist critiques simplify our understanding of the political life of American youth. Right now, young people are significantly more likely to participate in cultural activities than engage with institutional politics. As a consequence, those activist groups that have been most successful at helping youth find their civic voice often tap into participants’ interests in popular and participatory cultures, frequently blurring the distinction between what Mizuko Ito and her colleagues (Ito et al. 2009) categorized as friendship-driven and interest-driven modes of participation online. Ito et al. define friendship-driven modes as “dominant and mainstream practices of youth as they go about their day-to-day negotiations with friends and peers” (15). Such friendship-driven networks are often a “primary source of affiliation, friendship, and romantic partners” for youth. In contrast, interest-driven practices are rooted in “specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities.” Ito et al. clarify that the interest-driven activities often reside within the “domain of the geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks” (16). Kahne, Lee, and Feezell (2011) closed the circle between interest-driven activities and civic engagement when they examined how young people’s interest-driven online activities may “serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and, at times, political life” (15) and found a correlation between young people’s interest-driven participation online and increased civic behavior, including volunteering, group membership, and political expression.
Our research found significant overlap between friendship and interest-driven engagement among IC participants. In their analysis of IC interviews, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and her colleagues (2012) identified “shared media experiences” (gathering around texts that have a shared resonance), sense of community (identifying with a collective or network), and a wish to help (a desire to achieve positive change) as three key components of participants’ IC experiences. For a vast majority of the youth interviewed, all three components intersected with their “friendships” and “interests” as they chose to take action with their friends around issues they cared about. Ruth, who was an intern at IC’s offices in 2010, described her experience: “Invisible Children is a lot about relationships.… You work together, you play together, you eat together.” To Janelle, another intern, this approach results in a “complete great intertwining” of work and fun at IC, making it hard to separate the two. Like Ruth and Janelle, many other IC supporters felt that the group’s social elements were crucial to their sustained participation.
Similarly, many interviewees felt that “shared media experiences” significantly contributed to this sense of connection between IC youth. Melissa Brough (2012) traced the early history and tactics of Invisible Children, stressing that the group has long placed a high priority on media production as a means of creating awareness but also recruiting and training a movement of American young people determined to impact human rights concerns in Africa. Jason Russell and Bobby Bailey, recent graduates of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, along with Lauren Poole, who was enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, established Invisible Children in 2006 as an outgrowth of their documentary film Invisible Children: Rough Cut (2006), which called for the capture of Joseph Kony and fundraised for on-the-ground recovery efforts. The organization grew rapidly: Brough recounts that within six years, they had built an organization with 90 staff on the ground in Uganda running development programs, 30 paid U.S. staff managing outreach, a fundraising apparatus that brought in almost $32 million in 2012, and a network of more than 2,000 clubs in schools and churches. The group’s commitment of more than 9 percent of its budget to media making and another 35 percent to mobilization of youth in the United States became yet another site of controversy as Kony 2012 brought new scrutiny of the organization. Lana Swartz (2012) has similarly noted the diverse range of different media practices the group deploys:
“The Movement,” as Invisible Children calls its U.S.-facing work, includes visually arresting films, spectacular event-oriented campaigns, provocative graphic t-shirts and other apparel, music mixes, print media, blogs and more. To be a member of Invisible Children means to be a viewer, participant, wearer, reader, listener, commenter of and in the various activities, many mediated, that make up the Movement. It is a massive, open-ended, evolving documentary “story” unfurling across an expanding number of media forms.
Brian explained in an interview how IC’s media moves people to action: “There is just no way that if you have a beating heart and a pulse in you, that you can watch any of their films and not be moved into action afterwards.… [T]here is always something that resonates within you, just, wow, this is powerful.” IC youth we met were proud of the group’s media, which they saw as central tools in spreading its message.
Spreading Kony 2012
There has been a tendency to deal with Kony 2012 in isolation from the much longer history of IC efforts to rally public opinion against the African warlord. By the time IC released Kony 2012, the group had produced and circulated ten previous features and many shorts; helped get legislation passed in 2010; formed local clubs through high schools, colleges, and churches; recruited and trained thousands of young activists through intern programs, summer camps, and conventions; demonstrated the capacity to mobilize those supporters through local gatherings and demonstrations across the country; developed a large-scale operation on the ground in Africa and brought Ugandans to the United States to interface with American recruits; set up a Ugandan and American teacher exchange program; and run national conventions designed to train young activists so that they could explain what was happening in their own words. Kony 2012 did not simply “go viral” out of the blue; rather, IC had sustained a community and tested strategies of grassroots circulation that reached diverse participants and laid the groundwork for the film’s extraordinarily