StoryShowing | Kony 2 – Analysis

The Case Study

The IC’s (2012) campaign has been extensively researched and widely reviewed from a multitude of perspectives, with contributions assessing its impact across academic and social fields (Campbell, 2012; Foreign Policy, 2012; Kanczula, 2012; The Guardian, 2012; The Huffington Post, 2012; Tunheim, 2012).

Nevertheless, analyses were mostly synchronic to events with public commentators and academic researchers re-focusing on other priorities shortly after the campaign. In turn, this chapter addresses the IC’s campaign from a distance, using the campaign itself as an opportunity to critically review practices of visual storytelling.

As such, the chapter will first contextualize the campaign within its wider socio-political and media framework, then review it by reference to established grammars of storytelling. Conclusions will recommend a sensible management of the relation between storytelling and storyline, with a few lessons learnt for prospective uses.

The IC’s Campaign and Its Framework

The IC’s campaign officially began on 5 March 2012 with the simultaneous release across YouTube, Vimeo and on the IC’s website, of a 29-minute video (hereafter: IC, 2012). For IC, this represented the culmination of years of committed policies of socio-political awareness across a number of international fora nationally and globally.

IC’s stated aim was to achieve the indictment of the Lord Resistance Army’s Commander Joseph Kony, and IC explicitly timed its campaign to coincide with the US Presidential Election year.

IC arguably ran its integrated communication strategy on a double gamble. Firstly, the length of the video went, and still does, against all rules and best practices for online communication. Tunheim (2012) quantified in three minutes the average running time of successful YouTube videos and in four minutes the average running time of the top 10 YouTube videos. IC was surely aware of the dramatically decreasing attention span of audiences (Qualman, 2018): to argue for a visual-driven storytelling of 29 minutes promised to be an endeavour with unpredictable outcomes.

Secondly, IC chose to synchronize the launch with the US’ Presidential Election when public interest in political topics might be expected to rise. Though, the same rise in interest could have equally deprived IC of precious prime-time attention, as political news fights for a place on daily news bulletins and across the political debate.

While it is difficult to speculate on which supporting intelligence IC might have relied on for its assessment, it should be argued that IC viewed the communication challenge as an opportunity to wage a media Blitzkrieg. IC chose the election year to enforce a deadline-driven approach as its Damocles’ sword to leverage on its targeted stakeholders, the Democratic and Republican parties. The menace implicit in this strategy is that failing to engage with the IC’s agenda would incur the high cost of losing the primary targeted audience IC was after: US’ young voters.

In the author’s words,

…we need to remind them [US politicians] that, in this election year of fighting and name-calling, no matter what side you are on, this is something we can all agree on.

(IC, 2012, 24:04)

By using tactically the US’ election year, IC built up strategically its agenda both nationally and internationally: in turn, the efficaciousness of its engagement policy might be rightly appreciated as truly Kissinger-ian.

Nationally, IC’s explicit strategy employed a bottom-up commitment to lobby 20 American public/cultural figures and 12 American political representatives for the arrest of Kony.

To make ‘Kony world news by redefining the propaganda we see every day, all day, that dictates who and what we pay attention to’ (IC, 2012, 24:50) required the smooth and simultaneous integration of actions both online and offline: lobbying the 20112 public figures was carried out taking full advantage of all digital platforms, or, according to the taxonomy suggested above, by employing multimedia storytelling as strategized storylines.

Using cultural icons as ‘influencers’ led IC to gain massive coverage and to successfully achieve its leverage attempt: for instance, a tweet from Oprah skyrocketed threads on the topic from 66K to more than nine million in less than 24 hours (The Huffington Post, 2012).

Furthermore, social media actions were not used as an aim in itself (to gain followers and/or likes), but as a fully functional and integrated component to IC’s strategic effort, which was meant to culminate with the Cover The Night’s appointment.

[We will] blanket every street in every city till the sun comes up […] we will be smart and we will be thorough […] the rest of the world […] will wake up with hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice on every corner.

(IC, 2012, 25:40)

Meanwhile, on 21st March, US senators Inhofe and Coons put forward a resolution

condemning Joseph Kony and his ruthless guerrilla group for a 26- year campaign of terror […to back up] the effort of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the newest country, South Sudan, to stop Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.

(Inhofe, 2012)

An official statement pledged support ‘for the US’ effort to help regional forces pursue commanders of the militia group’ across both aisles of the Senate. Incidentally, in a rather surprising example of bi-partisanship during election time Senator Graham stated that:

When you get 100 million Americans looking at something, you will get our attention. This YouTube sensation is gonna help the Congress be more aggressive and will do more to lead to his demise than all other action combined.

(Kern, 2015, p. 201, emphasis added)

Through a comprehensive plan articulated with the combined arrangement of multiple actions, the campaign achieved unprecedented success in its reshaping of the public discourse: by incorporating media, channels and platforms as part of the campaigning, IC consistently tailored its storytelling into a series of consistent and strategized targeted storylines. Indeed, the resulting conversations rendered Kony truly famous, as IC had hoped by the sheer force of numbers (the 100 million Americans quoted above).

The campaign proved to be the first one to tactically rely on, and fully use, digital media for online activism, successfully re/framing public and cultural agendas (Kanczula, 2012).

IC’s commitment to root its campaign on a community of focused and engaged participants (as argued throughout the video), thoroughly and consistently supported implementation of its agenda through activities on digital media and public channels. IC explicitly reminded viewers that participants in the project should be termed neither participants nor audiences. Instead, IC claimed that, by joining in the campaign, individuals would not ‘study but shape human history’ (IC, 2012, 28:25): in so doing, they would truly become empowered and efficacious digital actors. By achieving ‘real’ outcomes, as exemplified by President Obama’s letter (see below), IC’s dedicated community, the US youth, would feel fully empowered and would therefore commit further to disseminate IC’s storytelling.

In turn, IC reiterated its call for dedicated activism by direct reference to the wider flow of global political events, including the unfolding ‘Arab Spring’, to exemplify the acquired centrality of digital media as tools of accountability (IC, 2012: Teaser).

IC’s Campaign under Storytelling Lenses

As stated above, this chapter aims to critically review the communication efficacy of the IC’s video as translated into a set of comprehensive storylines. As much as issues of veridicality are crucial to socio-political communication, these lie outside the present realm of intervention. For instance, the above-mentioned Obama letter (see IC, 2012, 18:50) should be critically reviewed in its truth-fulness and trust-fulness as a best fitting example of the difference between ‘shaping a story’ and ‘making things up’.

Visual polysemy has been previously argued in its capacity to turn a single image into multiple and co-existing meaning-making processes (Barthes, 1977). Visual images are indeed semiotically ‘open’ (Eco, 1989) because of the ‘irreducible plural’ and the ‘overcrossing’ of meanings they endlessly generate (Barthes, 1977, p. 159).

The following analysis will combine the storytelling formats of the Narrative Arc and the Hero’s Journey. These two techniques will be complemented by reference to basic archetypes and to the three ingredients part of each story ‘Theme, Coherence and Plausibility’ (Lupton, 2017, p. 36).

Freytag (1894) identified five consequential parts in the analysis of any dramatic work: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Through implementation of the Narrative Arc approach, the following storytelling has been identified and argued for.

As per the rules of visual communication (Cartier-Bresson, 2018), even the smallest alteration may illicit dramatic changes to any storytelling; if even a single photograph carries the potential multiplicity of co-existing messages (Barthes’ ‘irreducible plural’), the semiotic possibilities for a 29-minute video are virtually infinite.

Indeed, the above Narrative Arc is not the sole possible storytelling, and different ones could be identified via the intersection of alternative studia and puncta (plural of Barthes’ studium and punctum). These two notions were left overall unclarified, if not unresolved, by Barthes, who would roughly identify the studium as ‘meanings that are nameable […] given cultural meanings that we understand at once’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 44). The punctum, by contrast,

will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me […an] accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). […] The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like. The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving.

(Barthes, 1981, pp. 26–27)

Storytelling’s semiotics might be placed at the intersection between multiple and shifting combinations of studia and puncta, i.e. of different liking and loving emotions. The better a storytelling is arranged in its combination of form by content, the more focused, constrained and finalized its polysemy is: IC’s storytelling was majestically arranged, first, and then strategically translated into its consequential storylines as dichotomies on the tone of ‘Us vs. them’, ‘Young vs. old’ and ‘Commitment vs. apathy’, or in other words, of ‘Good vs. evil’.

However, visual polysemy should not too easily disregard as ‘tamed’ for the present context; because of the synchronic quality of the visual (Paivio, 1990), puncta perform distinctive storytellings through the highly personalized quality (the loving mentioned above) in the relation between the frame and the viewer. Furthermore, the process might occur both at a quantitative and qualitative level; the former when different audiences look at the same video, with the latter happening as the same audience engages the video at different times, and, hence, within shifting phenomenological states of ‘being in the world’.

In reference to Freytag’s Narrative Arc, storytelling was identified among multiple potential options available. This recognized storytelling might indeed be questioned by reference to alternative puncta, in consideration to chosen events and their lengths. In order to validate the shared analysis, this will be tested against the format of the Hero’s Journey.

This approach, like the Narrative Arc, has a long history (Campbell, 1949), often overlapping with psychoanalytic notions of myths (Eliade, 1976) and archetypes (Jung, 1990). Regardless of its different features, what all paradigms share is the notion of ‘change’ occurring to the main character, the ‘Hero’. By storytelling how the Hero becomes other than that which they were before, change makes each and every story both personally relevant and universal.

In short, the format of the Hero’s Journey goes as such: an ordinary context is unsettled because of a sudden change requiring the Hero to act upon; by answering their call and leaving the comforts of their past life, the character faces a number of challenges that makes them ‘other’ and ‘more’ by the time they return home. Classic examples include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. These stories present an educational journey for any audience to learn by personification: this eventually makes even the most distant journey truly memorable as it is relevant to each and every one.

Lupton argues that the five ingredients of each story are ‘Arc, Change, Theme, Coherence and Plausibility’ (Lupton, 2017, p. 36). The arc element has been addressed above in its five components. The change component has been similarly assessed, by pinpointing the transformation from the ‘Young Hero’ into the ‘Wise Man’.

The three elements that Lupton adds, namely, the theme, coherence and plausibility, address the extent to which any storytelling would require to be validated as both understandable and valuable. Indeed, IC informed its storytelling with coherent and plausible elements by presenting convincing characters, while crafting a consistent and consequential flow.

Above, the storytelling techniques of the Narrative Arc and the Hero’s Journey have been matched and further complemented by reference to some basic archetype figures. The pending issue seems now to pivot on who is the Hero that IC particularly targets to transform beyond the storytelling’s most immediate representation.

As the classics dictate, the Hero is someone that does not study history, but rather shapes it. Exactly like Jason was changed by the story of Jacob, everyone engaging the IC’s campaign becomes the transformed Hero: Jason’s transformation is his viewers’ journey. Each viewer is the Hero shaping today’s events as history and making a difference, globally.

IC’s comprehensive storytelling run, undoubtedly, in a very strategic manner through offline and online engagement tactics and very effective follow-up operations: as such, it will be here referred as an effective storyline, which led to a yet unparalleled global impact making Kony truly famous (The Huffington Post, 2012; Tunheim, 2012). All this was majestically complemented, and viewing data unquestionably state so, with a final call to action (IC, 2012, 23:00–29:10), further empowered by the prospect of future actions (IC, 2012, 29:10–30:00).

All three semiotic strategies used above (the Narrative Arc, The Hero’s Journey and the archetypes), as completed by reference to Lupton’s toolkit, converge on one clearly argued storytelling: you, the US’ digital youth of 2012, will be making history by joining our Quest.

IC successfully translated its storytelling as storylines to leverage targeted American cultural, public and political (20112) stakeholders. Once IC gained the ability to shape its storytelling as storyline (see below), those wishing to challenge/ criticize/question IC’s communication had not the ability, nor the resources, to do so. Furthermore, IC prevented conversations from happening on its platforms, thus forcing confrontational storytellings to argue their counter-narrative/s elsewhere.

Eventually, it should be recognized that all oppositional voices challenged IC’s storytelling by either reasoning or fact-checking; further, they challenged IC’s storytelling through, mostly, if not solely, verbal arguments. In addition, they did so on platforms with a much-limited audience: even for those commenting on Facebook, numbers were infinitely smaller than IC’s. As such, IC’s rooted and committed community proved the strongest strategic asset at its disposal (Campbell, 2012).

For instance, Kagumire as one of most respected commentators on Uganda from Uganda had worldwide recognition as expert and scholar on the region, though with a very limited public profile. She still covers socio-political issues of her country and the Region, collaborating with a wide array of political actors and very respected partners (Kagumire, 2012).

Whatever her authority and expertise, she could not digitally compete with IC, as a crude comparison between viewing data on YouTube, as per end of April 2020, indicates: 102M (with 236K subscribers and 1.3M likes) for IC Vs. 637K (with 443 subscribers and 9.5K) for Kagumire. Furthermore, Kagumire would not have had the time, nor, arguably, the resources, to shape a storytelling as visually compelling and emotional-driven as that of IC; like for any chess game, early positioning proved of capital importance.

Publics, ‘public opinions’ and ‘civil societies’ are radically evolving because of, and through, digital assets and, increasingly more, because of the emotional capital of visual media and storytelling formats. Visual communication, in virtue of its synchronic grammar of communication, has altered verification procedures for issues of trust and accountability: in result, the disjunction of the real from the represented is widening and becoming increasingly un-knowable. This is the reason why the strategic usage of media, channels and platforms to tailor a storytelling as purposeful storylines might be rightly assessed as key to managing contemporary digital cultures.

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The Kony 2012 Campaign – 3 Conclusions