The problem with the world is that a whole lot of things happen, all the time. And a lot of them are pretty big and significant.
Well, that’s not actually a problem, per se. For the most part, these big, significant things make for a more exhilarating, enriching life. The problem is in communicating and relaying that information to the world.
Enter social media. At every moment, an absurd amount of things happen, whether public or personal, and there’s a lag time associated with writing articles or airing news stories. Twitter and Facebook, however, reduce that lag time to virtual immediacy—with instantaneous, real-time updates. And that’s not all—they’re liked, shared, commented, retweeted. They’re discussed. Twitter and Facebook become liminal spaces that meld awareness and discussion into one—facts and opinions, personal and private.
So how do you share that information with the world swiftly and effectively? With platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you have to be concise, in order for the post to be one that people read, like, share and comment on. And, of course, your post has to be exciting, perhaps peppered with an “OMG GAISE GUESS WHAT!!!!!” Those always make the best statuses.
But few people are going to read someone’s Facebook status if it’s an essay. Heck, Twitter doesn’t even let you type more than 140 characters into a post.
And so, if you learn of something important that you want to share, you write something brief and snappy. You reduce it to what’s most important, what’s most interesting, what’s most status and tweet-worthy.
Thus, the rhetoric of Facebook and Twitter is, necessarily, reductive.
The problem with this reductive rhetoric is it’s so easy to spread. Liking, retweeting, sharing—these can all be done with a click of a button. And so, when we do, we either look lazy or are made lazy. We’re not forced to consider all the facts, the big picture any more—we only have to look at the 140-character tweet or one-sentence Facebook post and link that so many people liked. And then we can share it as we please. Doing so is simple and makes us look cool. Even if we do consider every perspective and read all articles on the issue, our Facebook presence reduces us to a “like” or a comment.
Causes and movements have realized this and shaped the way they spread their message accordingly. Take—and I’m really sorry to bring this issue up for the millionth time—the recent Kony 2012 campaign and Invisible Children, the charity behind it. They’ve been criticized for oversimplifying issues by generalizing groups as “The Raped” Ugandan girls and “The Abducted” Ugandan child soldiers. A real headline that appeared in the video: “The World agrees, Kony is the ‘Worst.’” After all his atrocities, the only way they think to describe him is as the “worst.” With this simplification of rhetoric, we aren’t encouraged to think of these issues creatively or complexly.
But when your movement hinges on the efforts of youth and social media, how else can you spread your message all over the world? By demonstrating overly complex, convoluted reporting and exploring all facets of the issue? Tl;dr, man.
A simple, powerful explanation, even if it must exaggerate or have informational holes in order to be that way, can be incredibly effective for the purposes of a Facebook status or tweet, and encouraging people to read, to like, to share in the millions, virally and explosively.
Moreover, the focus on spreading awareness through Internet hash-tagged collectivized language—#Kony2012, #StopKony—takes the focus away from the man himself and puts it on the movement, on the flux and flow of information and awareness. #Kony becomes a trending topic, a cool thing to talk about. He becomes much easier to spread to millions of people.
And so Invisible Children and the people behind Kony 2012 used all these facets of social media. And what did they get for it? More than 78 million views on YouTube in one week. Probably hundreds of op-ed articles in newspapers everywhere. That’s absurd. That’s record-breaking.
Regardless of all the criticism that they oversimplified the situation in Uganda, perhaps they had to, due to the nature of social media. These networks provided the only way to reach the number and scale of people they did.
Maybe it was all one big master plan. And, thanks to a keen awareness of social media, it’s one of the most successful master plans I’ve seen in a long time.
Indu Ramesh is a Trinity junior. Her columns runs every other Friday. Follow Indu on Twitter @IRrationally
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