Why KONY 2012 Went Viral and What We Can Learn From It
KONY 2012 went viral for three reasons: it reframed the issue to suit it’s audience, it was simple, and it was well-made. You’ll notice, none of those have to do with Africa. Joseph Kony and his crimes alone, while tragic, are not sufficiently compelling to tip an activist’s video into the mainstream. There are terrible things in this world and when confronted by them we’ve learned to disengage, to change the channel, to say no. Out of sight, out of mind.
KONY 2012 flips the script in an astonishingly effective way. It’s been viewed 43 million times in 3 days, up from 15 million at this time last night. As persuasive media, the video is a work of art. Here are three reasons why KONY 2012 went viral, and the lessons we can learn from them.
March 9, 2012 Leave a comment
SOPA: Symptom of a Bought Congress
The fight against SOPA tipped today. It’s no longer something discussed only on tech blogs and in law school classrooms; you might even hear it on the 6 o’clock news. Much is wrong with the legislation, but an important point has been overlooked: SOPA typifies our broken system of government. continue reading »
January 19, 2012 Leave a comment
On Steve Jobs, and Bridges.
We had come to know Steve Jobs as the showman, the visionary, the genius. In his death, we treated him as such. It was a circus announced first by testaments to his greatness and then, quietly, by the recognition of his faults. As time passed we were shown his extremes; his ability to create and to tear down. As it turned out, the man who designed the most alluring products of his era was often cruel and unforgiving. His dedication to art and design masked a disregard for the human costs of his work to employees, family, consumers and those who manufactured his products. These polarizing traits cannot be ignored, but I think they miss his true genius, and the real reason why we cared about him.
January 11, 2012 1 Comment
Presidential Primaries and Quarterly Capitalism: A Crisis of Priorities
America faces a crisis of priorities. Presidential hopefuls competing for their party’s nomination appeal to their base, at the expense of the politically moderate. Corporations focus their operations on meeting quarterly expectations, at the expense of long term investment. The structural conditions leading to this environment should be changed to realign political and economic priorities in favor of long term vision and sustainable growth.
December 5, 2011 Leave a comment
The Egyptian Protests: Technology’s Role?
An excerpt from my honors thesis, research also supported by the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.
In philosophy, “agency” refers to the capacity of an agent to act in a world. Using technology terms in this context contributes to a conceptual framework in which technology appears to directly cause or shape events independent of human interaction. According to Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith, professors at MIT, technological agency “is typified by sentences in which ‘technology,’ or a surrogate like ‘the machine,’ is made the subject of an active predicate.”[1] In the case of the 2011 Egyptian protests, for example, “Facebook paved the way for Tahrir square.”[2] continue reading »
August 18, 2011 Leave a comment
A Decision, and other thoughts
Im facing a decision, one that asks important questions about the creative process and idea security in a digital world: Where should I store my thoughts, ideas, bookmarks, journals, etc? Do I commit them to a digital or web-based service (evernote, springpad, etc), should I stick to pen and paper, or a combination of the two? Some thoughts…
August 10, 2011 Leave a comment
Digital Scholarship and the End of Books
“The raw material of history appears to be heading for the cloud.
What once was hard is now easy. What was slow is now fast.
Is this a case of “be careful what you wish for”?”
James Cleick’s recent Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes raises important questions about how we interact with information. As libraries around the world undertake ambitious projects to digitize their resources, is the “mystery of history” lost? Is an insight discovered by a search engine any less valuable than one found after hours of pouring over library shelves? continue reading »
July 20, 2011 Leave a comment
Kickstarting Creativity
While reading tech blogs this summer I came across an exciting start-up called Kickstarter. Kickstarter serves as a crowdfunding platform for creative projects. Crowdfunding can be thought of as a merger between microfinance and crowdsourcing. People are invited to donate small sums, anywhere from $1-$1000, to help artists, photographers, filmmakers, programmers, even lingerie-makers and lock-pick makers get their creative projects started. As word of the project spreads, typically through blogs and social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, donations begin to add up.
September 21, 2010 1 Comment
A Different Approach to Financial Aid
In June 2010, student debt in the United States surpassed credit-card debt. According to figures from the Federal Reserve, American student loans total roughly $830 billion versus credit-card debts of roughly $827 billion. Another WSJ article from earlier this year discussed the dangers of student loans and explains the ways they differ from other types of debt. Unlike home or car loans, an education cannot be repossessed by the lending institution in exchange for the alleviation of debt, and student loans cannot typically be discharged by filing for bankruptcy.
September 16, 2010 Leave a comment
Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief
In July 2010, unprecedented monsoon rains triggered massive flooding in Pakistan. By the middle of August, flooding covered one-fifth of Pakistan’s total land area. Roughly 21 million Pakistanis, or about 10% of the country’s population, have been affected by the flooding. Although the flooding in Pakistan has affected more people than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (5 million), the 2005 Kashmir earthquake (3 million), and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (3 million) combined, relief aid and press coverage has lagged far behind past crises.
A number of innovative organizations have begun to take a different approach to disaster relief, and the flooding in Pakistan presented one of the first opportunities to test their efforts. CrisisCommons is a “global network of volunteers who help people and places in times of crisis. They mobilize tech-savvy volunteers to develop technical solutions that facilitate information sharing. CrisisCommons organized CrisisCamps across the world that brought together both programmers and non-technical volunteers to innovate solutions to common problems during crises. One such solution, engineered at the latest round of CrisisCamps, is I’m Ok, a simple application designed to allow people to tell their family and friends they are ok during an emergency, when landlines and cellular networks may be down.
September 15, 2010 Leave a comment