After watching, Kony 2012, a video made by The Invisible Children, I was thoroughly doubtful of the effects of what is suggested I do. The creator of the video is telling us that we should make signs so that the government will see that we care about Joseph Kony being arrested. He also said that the reason we should do this, is so the United States can keep it's troops in Uganda where they are training the Ugandan military to capture Joseph Kony. But for me there are one too many steps in this plan. By doing what they tell us to do, we might be doing our part, but how do we trust that the US military can teach the Ugandans how to capture Kony. I think that to make this video better, the writer should have really convinced the viewer that the US military can help the Ugandans find Joseph Kony. One thing I will say though is that the writer did do a great job making us feel terrible for these people who have suffered because of Joseph Kony. The video made me feel like I needed to help these people. They did this by using strong words such as mutilated, and then showed us horrific images of young boys with mutilated faces. I wanted to help those boys.
After watching the video Kony 2012 I immediately switched to the article Beyond Kony 2012 by Bryan Early and Robert Tynes. What these two people criticize the writers of Kony 2012 for doing is failing to educate the viewer on why Joseph Kony is stealing these children. They tell us that these child soldiers are taken not for people like Kony's individual use but most often they're used by rebel groups fighting the government of countries. The use of child soldiers is not just in Uganda either, it's in many continents, Asia, Europe and South America. So, what's the use in spending all this time and money and resources on just one symptom of a major problem. By using up all these resources on Joseph Kony we are giving up on the other countries in which child soldiers are being used. That is what the video failed to tell us. After reading this article I was a bit ashamed of myself for instantly wanting to do something to help capture Joseph Kony. Especially because I had already done research on this subject and I knew that Uganda was just one of many suffering countries.
Kony 2012 was a very successful video, but it also manipulated many people. Like I said before, to focus too much on Uganda is like taking away the runny nose part of having a cold but keeping the cold inside of you. Uganda is just a symptom of the problem of child soldiers, and Kony 2012 made us want to focus on the symptom. I think that the video was very well done and I was very impressed with how angry it made me feel towards Joseph Kony. But I think it failed to tell the truth in many places.
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