KONY 2012

I remember back in 2012 when my entire school started talking about Kony. I first heard about it from my form tutor one morning when she asked the class if we had seen the video being shared on Facebook. Initially I didn’t watch the video for a while as I just ignorantly brushed it off as an extra bit of homework, which I wasn’t particularly interested in doing. It wasn’t until I started overhearing conversations in class about the video, and my friends starting to tell me about little bits of facts they had heard through watching the video or word of mouth that I decided to watch it. I wanted to know why everyone felt so strongly about what was happening in Uganda in comparison to everything else happening in the world.

I was aware for a while that there was trouble in Uganda but I never really paid much attention to it. Watching the news every other weekday began to take away the shock factor when it came to finding out about horrific crimes across the world as it happens so often, I became desensitised. This is why I was so thrown off when I watched the video. I was expecting it to be like just any other news report, where its mostly just facts being released and lacking any real emotional content.

Jason Russell’s 30 minute documentary was very effective at encouraging me to feel some empathy towards the civilians living in Uganda. I believe one of the main reasons I felt so moved by it was the fact that Jason constantly spoke about how we could get involved and help the situation. When Jason discuses the impact social media can have on western politics it made me feel empowered. When I discussed this with my friends at school we all agreed this was something we all felt whilst watching it. It’s what encouraged us to share the video. We believed sharing the video online would help let more and more people know about what was happening and encourage more people to take action. Being around 14/15 at the time the video released a lot of my peers, including myself felt like we had no influence in the world as we were still children unable to do things such as vote.