StoryShowing | Kony 3 – Conclusions
Conclusions
Smartphones are worldwide more present than toothbrushes (Qualman, 2018). In result, media production and dissemination capabilities fully intertwine with and thoroughly enhance today’s social media practices across multiple and overlapping platforms.
In such a context, it could be argued that noticeable and effective communication is at everyone’s fingertips because of smartphones availability and easiness of production; and with it, the very concrete ability to re/shape current cultures through dedicated and focused socio-political activities. Storytelling, thus, can be looked at the empowering toolkit through which digital users have the potential to aptly and strategically plan and pursue their aims.
The amount of visual information being produced on a daily basis is unparalleled and continuously growing. The visual is the object of enormous media production and, consequentially, of digital dissemination; in turn, visual content constitutes the vast majority of all produced, distributed and consumed data (Deloitte Global, 2017).
However, as Toscani argues, to be able (and/or capacitated) to produce a photograph doesn’t make one a photographer (Toscani, 2017): in fact, media production skills are not one with media literacy competencies. Indeed, visual communication requires both the practical skills and the sensibility that only education can foster: as such, it asks for the software, i.e. the thinking abilities, possibly more than the hardware, i.e. the camera.
The challenge visual forms bring to current digital frameworks extends from the pre-production phase to the production and post-production, as suggested through the above discussion on the Stop Kony campaign. This impacts current debates on the ontology and epistemology of storytelling, and of visual storytelling, specifically. It consequently changes how we perceive ourselves as ‘human beings’, and fully informs what we are becoming.
This is the reason why the relation between the real and its interpretations, alongside its disseminations as dedicated stories, continues to gather attention across all digital actors contributing to today’s quickly evolving politics of communication.
As each image conveys the potential for multiple and, even contrasting, semiotic spaces and emotional universes, to choose one image over another is already (and should indeed be appreciated as such) a purposeful choice on the real as ‘that specific real’.
Alongside with the issue of which real to articulate as what storytelling to be then communicated as a dedicated storyline, decision-making on practices and strategies, processes and policies, do inform all phases of communication. How does the gigantic amounts of pictures endlessly shot worldwide on smartphones change representation and understanding of visual societies? Does it facilitate, or even promote, visual literacy in terms of skills development and/or competencies enhancement? As the world is increasingly narrated visually, is it also better visually understood?
To become effective visual storytellers, one is required to master visual storytelling’s production capabilities in its operational and strategic usage; s/he is therefore required to manage the tools and competencies of today’s grammars of socio-political engagement across both the media and the socio-political realms.
As the former is thoroughly ineffective without the latter, these skill sets are required to turn storytelling into bespoke storylines, first through the crafting of evocative and consistent storytelling, and then with its strategic dissemination as convincing storylines.
IC engaged the visual form as a powerful communicative tool, and fully adopted aesthetics as its semiotic propeller (Fusari, forthcoming). As such, IC’s success should be identified in the apt combination of form with content, both at the storytelling and storyline moments.
The majestic quality of IC’s storytelling was achieved through a key feature of storytelling techniques, i.e. the effective usage of emotions. As +Acumen, a leading platform on digital literacy, argues, storytelling is ‘feelings, nothing more than feelings’ (+Acumen, 2019), and this is what makes storytelling templates fully evocative and therefore convincing.
The IC’s campaign to indict Kony successfully implemented the relation between the emotive component of visual storytelling and its strategic usage on digital media as bespoke storylines. This essay explored the relation between the real and the represented, with particular attention to the specific visual literacy requirements, now as much as then, that are required to manage the visual storytelling of politics.
The case study of the IC’s campaign, among several other considerations, marked the acquired capability of media, and visual media specifically, to impact with considerable magnitude today’s socio-political discourse. IC’s unquestionable ability to turn its storytelling into powerful storylines is the reason why IC was chosen as a still relevant case study nine years after its appearance, which is truly a very long time for digital parameters.
The IC’s campaign illustrates that the successful usage of the visual quality of storytelling, with its emotional capital for digital media, is key to its dissemination as understood storylines. As Kevin Spacey argues, once storytelling is effective, ‘you will have kids forcing media on their peers in a way that any blockbuster movie could only dream of’ (Spacey, 2013). Indeed, this trickle-down model was witnessed at every step of the IC’s campaign, from the crafting of the storytelling to its dissemination strategies as storylines: US youth was the unstoppable actor forcing IC’s agenda on celebrities and political figures (the 20+12) for them to leverage IC’s un-negotiated agenda onto Washington.
New actors beyond the State system, what has previously been addressed under the rubric of ‘public diplomacy’, have surfaced to impact and re/shape cultures, publics and politics worldwide. Their tool to raise, re/direct and possibly re/root cultural paradigms of social changes has expanded to include the apt production, distribution and engagement of (visual) storytelling as understood (multimedia and hence: multisensorial) storylines.
However, activities that are part of today’s digital politics continue to shift across evolving forms of engagement on unmapped territories, with no clear direction for analysts or practitioners yet to follow; IC’s twin bracelets included in its distributed toolkit or the ‘pay as you can’ fundraising model/supporting scheme (IC, 2012, 25:15) are very clear examples of bespoke strategies to commit targeted audiences in a sensible way for the target group.
In such a fluid and hybrid scenario, the synchronic quality of visual media challenges the basics of cognitive processes: for instance, to say ‘the red rose smells’ is different from drawing or picturing a red rose because graphic elements are processed at different speeds and by different areas of the brain (Caviglioli, 2019). Hence, distinct elements within the frame (as well as outside it, for instance: the prospective) are differently prioritized by the audience’s mind: the result produces multiple, co-existing and ever-changing cognitive understandings.
Politics and communication rely on, and, in turn, feed human beings; the visual as the adjective to both media and storytelling, identifies a field of highly questioned, massively evolving and exceptionally volatile semiotic engagements: all the above contributes to approach current cultures as ‘post-symbolic communication’ (Lanier, 2011).
Visual-driven storytelling is increasingly popular and popularized on smartphones: its over-production and consequential re/informing presence endlessly changes forms of public knowledge as communication, understanding and media dissemination of contents.
As much as storytelling was previously recommended as an agent to order visual communication, it should be eventually appreciated that things are not that easy, nor yet already solved: in fact storytelling, as a format of visual communication, informs digital politics as multiplied shifting representations.
The synchronic (Paivio, 1990) quality of the visual should be therefore recognized as ontological; it should be further appreciated as the definitive argument against the supposed simplicity, easiness or immediacy of this specific communicative form. In fact, the visual is a complex and multifaceted media form that requires literacy skills development and intellectual sophistication (Fusari, forthcoming).
The profound mark that IC produced with its Kony 2012 video is yet unmatched and offers a final opportunity for two major takeaways, with both of them becoming increasingly relevant:
- crafting a powerful visual storytelling is as challenging as effective when audiences understand it through effective storylines: IC would have never re/ shaped the public discourse globally without its 29-minute superb video as tailored into convincing storylines;
- turning storytelling into storylines must be consistently arranged through credible, shareable and consistent sets of targeted operations on multiple and integrated platforms.
As media channels and digital platforms acquired an undisputed centrality, their operational management and strategic engagement continues to be at the centre of the communication debate. How to prioritize media forms, digital platforms and the dichotomy between social media and digital networks when communicating politics? What to make of digital actors that overlap and/or re/ shape strategic communication to their advantage? How, eventually, to make sense and respond to trolls?
IC proved the extent to which a compelling visual storytelling has the capability to effectively implement strategized media actions as engaged storylines. Visual storytelling was identified as that which matches the right form for a specific content and, in turn, the right content for the identified media form; its result is then purposely and tactically tailored into dedicated storylines. IC’s storytelling chose simplicity and linearity over multifaceted richness; it did so to regiment its sensorially articulated storytelling into a monolithic storyline of Good vs. Evil.
Strategy is indeed pivotal to communicate the real as that representation through the tailoring of each and every available medium: the sonic, the visual and the verbal, each of them requires dedicated frameworks and offers the opportunity for the integrated and enhanced engagement of their bespoke features. For instance, silence as the absence of sound, has the ability to thoroughly reframe and re/signify multimedia communication to purposely activate an emotion and achieve an aim.
Similarly, what is referred to as ‘negative space’ could be purposely used as a communicative feature alongside aesthetic notions of colour, shape, lines, and spaces of composition. In other words, there is no form of communication that cannot be used tactically to achieve a key result.
This brief analysis of what is still – in 2021 – the most effective and impactful socio-political campaign was aimed to specifically evince the centrality of the visual as the form of communication shaping media and politics globally. The visual was pleaded not only as the medium informing today’s cultures globally, but as a specific form of communication increasingly crucial to engage with socio-political issues. In addition, visual storytelling was identified as the pivot through which contents are convened as purposeful storylines.
Failing to tactfully and strategically master these elements will continue to make visual communication un-appreciated, un-strategized and overall misunderstood, turning inter-personal and social understanding, as well as appreciation of human and cultural perception, in a prolonged state of crisis (Ryan-Mosely, 2021). This is the reason why approaching an educated and strategic appreciation of the visual medium, and of storytelling as a format of communication, remains, today, more relevant than ever.
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