In Defense of KONY 2012

KONY 12, the 30-minute documentary uploaded to YouTube on March 5, already has more than 56 million views - or averaging better than 10 million views per day.   The video is being talked about in mass media - I heard reports about it on WINS radio in New York City yesterday, and saw coverage on MSNBC and CNN in the evening.  It's everywhere.  And, surprisingly, the video has generated some controversy.

I say surprisingly because although anything that successful will usually attract some critics, KONY 12 is about the depredations of Joseph Kony, who for decades has forced boys into his military service in Uganda, forced girls to become prostitutes, and used kidnapping and murder to achieve his purposes.  Certainly anything other than gratitude for bringing such atrocities to the world's attention is surprising.

Meenal Vamburkar has summarized some of the criticisms on Mediaite.   They amount to "oversimplification" - a critique of the way the facts are presented in the documentary, and a claim that the 30-minute movie did not present all of the facts.

At least one critic has found fault with director Jason Russell's employment of his five-year-old son to carry some of the narrative.   We see the boy, wide-eyed, learning and responding to what his father very carefully and tenderly tells him about Joseph Kony.  If this was the sum total of the movie, then, yes, of course, this narrative would be an oversimplification, because you cannot tell a five-year all of those distressing facts.   But Jason's son is just a part of this movie, and in this role I thought his screen time was one of the most effective presentations I've ever seen in a documentary (it was reminiscent of the excellent documentary, Tiffany Shlain's Connected, about human connectivity, released last year).  All of us who didn't know about Kony before this movie are in effect in the same place as Jason's son.

As for KONY 12 not including important information, I would say it's ipso facto impossible for any 30-minute documentary to provide all significant information and details on any subject, even if everyone agreed on just what those details were.   So does this mean that no one should make a 30-minute documentary on an important topic?   Of course not, and the public's remedy for any missing information is to provide it.

Which gets us to what the movie wants to do, and wants us to do.  That would be, first and foremost, to learn about Joseph Kony.   The movie explicitly invokes Facebook and social media, and asks viewers to talk about Joseph Kony to the world audience that social media (or, what I call New New Media) have engendered.   The movie's critics are doing just what the movie wants, and if the heightened Kony profile leads to an end of his horrendous activities, that would be a great victory indeed for social media and the people of the world.

Four Important Documentaries in 2011

Looking back at 2011, I would say that it was a great year for documentaries.  Here are four that I had the pleasure to see, learned a lot from, and reviewed.  They are listed in date order, because ranking them would be apples and oranges.  The dates and links are those of my reviews, which could be earlier than official release dates, in cases in which I was able to see a preview.

• January 6, 2011:  There But for Fortune, Kenneth Bowser's vivid, incisive movie about Phil Ochs, second only to Bob Dylan in the opinion of many, certainly above Dylan in some ways ... more relevant than ever in view of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring ... look for it on PBS in 2012 ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• January 18, 2011: Default: The Student Loan Documentary, Aurora Meneghello's movie about usurious bank practices regarding student loans ...  one of the main causes of Occupy Wall Street ... look for it on PBS in 2012 ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• August 14, 2011: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, known as the Yiddish Mark Twain, Aleichem showed - and this movie by Joseph Dorman shows -  a first-rate understanding of media on the level of  Marshall McLuhan, in the centenary of McLuhan's birth ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• September 2, 2011: Connected, Tiffany Shlain's triple threat movie, one part bio-doc about her father Leonard, one part history of media ala Marshall McLuhan, one-part about the growing interconnectedness of our world now expressed in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring ... details on the movie's Facebook page

Occupy Wall Street, Direct Democracy, Social Media: A Thumbnail History of Media and Politics Since Ancient Athens

The role of social media in triggering and facilitating the now world-wide Occupy Wall Street protests - of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and kindred systems in getting word out about Occupations, and documenting them for the world to see and join - has been remarked upon so often as to almost seem a cliche.  But the link between social media and direct democracy is true and profound, and is the current culmination of an evolution of media and political expression that began in ancient times.

Back in the city state of Athens, in the time of Pericles, direct democracy arose, in part because of the new literacy that allowed citizens to be informed of public events and the views and actions of their leaders.   The words that these people read were handwritten, which meant that anyone who wanted to write and be read could do so.  Writing and publishing were just as about as easy, in other words, as reading.  

All of that changed dramatically with the invention of the printing press, which had the wonderful result of spreading the written word to millions, but the anti-democratic effect of greatly reducing the ratio of published writers to readers.   Millions of people became accustomed to reading words written by a handful of others.   Unsurprisingly, when democracy slowly re-emerged in the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, it was not the direct democracy of Ancient Athens.  Instead, it was a representative kind of democracy, in which elected officials made all the decisions, and all the people could do was vote the representatives up or down.   This was almost exactly parallel to the transformation in information production and reception brought about by the printing press, in which all the people could do is read and agree or disagree with a book or manifesto or pamphlet, and in no way write or produce it, unless you were in the less than one-percent of the population fortunate to have a monarch's or a printer's (later publisher's) favor.

This inequality of producer and consumer - few producers and legion consumers - was not only continued but exacerbated by the advent of broadcast media, which reduced the number of producers (harder to get your views on radio and television than in newspapers, which at least has letters to the editors) while increasing the number of consumers.   People in representative democracies became better informed, but the information was created by fewer and fewer people.  In some countries, such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, this inequality was masterfully mined to do away with democracy altogether.

The introduction of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the first decade of the 21st century shifted that ratio back to a more even distribution of producer and consumer for the first time since the handwritten manuscript held sway in Ancient Athens.   These new media live online, but they were unlike other new media like Amazon and iTunes, which still run for the most part like traditional publishing media, with few producers and many consumers.   In contrast, any one can Tweet, post a status on Facebook, upload a video to YouTube - any consumer could become a producer.  That's why I say these new social media are not just new but "new new media".

People in the streets, demanding freedom and justice in the Arab Spring, and redress of economic grievances in the United States, Europe, and Asia, are the healthy and long-overdue political expression of the revolution in social or new new media.  The Occupy movements are expressing a dissatisfaction with others making decisions for us - with our elected representatives doing the bidding of banks rather than the people who elected them.

With means of expressing one's political views in almost everyone's pockets and hands, the age of mass media and representative democracy may well be in irreversible decline, replaced by the more equitable system of direct democracy in which the majority not only truly rules, but in which everyone's views can get a public hearing, and everyone can vote at any and all times.   Campaigns such as Dylan Ratigan's to "get the money out of politics" may be well meaning, but miss the point that it's representative democracy itself that must go or be transformed into a system of democracy that always moves to the people's views.

I talked about all of this a bit more and led a discussion after the 7:15pm screening of Tiffany Shlain's new movie Connected, at the Angelika Film Center in New York City this Wednesday, October 19.

I also discussed many of these issues on Good Day Street Talk, Fox-NY-5, on a panel taped on Thursday October 20 and broadcast Saturday October.   Video is here:



Occupy Wall Street Chronicles, Part 1

Review of Connected: A Triple Threat Movie by Tiffany Shlain

Just saw Tiffany Shlain's new documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology via private online screening.  I saw an earlier version about a year ago, and was well impressed both times.

The movie is actually three in one -

1. Connected is a sagely and even delightfully presented story of our interconnectedness as a species - among ourselves, all living things, and the technologies through which we extend ourselves and give substance to our imaginations, plans, and desires.   In its warnings about what we can do wrong - such as Mao's killing of sparrows to improve harvests (sparrows eat seeds) which resulted in massive crop failure (fewer sparrows resulted in more locusts, also eaten by sparrows) - Connected is cousin to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.  In the hope it holds out for our new media, it is the kind of movie Buckminster Fuller might have made.

2.  Connected is a passionate biography of Leonard Shlain (1937-2009) - Tiffany's father - whose The Alphabet versus the Goddess (1999) argued that the advent of the alphabet over earlier forms of writing encouraged masculine thinking and dominance.   In its daring media determinism and historical sweep, the book put Leonard Shlain on a par with Julian Jaynes as a worthy successor to Marshall McLuhan in provocative and mind-opening hypothesis.

3. But Connected is most of all an autobiography of Tiffany Shlain, who recounts her inspiration by her father, her struggle with his passing, her struggle to make sense of the curves the universe has thrown her, and in one way or another, throws at all of us.   That's what it means to be an intelligent being in this world, someone who doesn't just accept what she or he finds, but seeks to understand it, get a little on top of it, and thereby have a little bit more say and control over the course of our lives and the world.

Narrated by Tiffany Shlain and Peter Coyote. Animated bits by Stefan Nadelman (of Food Fight fame). Highly recommended for students of media - indeed, for students of life.

Connected opens in major cities in America in September - here 's a list - and Fordham University will be hosting a special free screening on September 25 as part of its Media at the Center McLuhan Centenary symposia.

Note added October 14, 2011:  I was at the premiere screening in New York City - at the Angelika Film Center - earlier this evening.  The movie's better than ever on the big screen, and the audience loved it.  It's become increasingly clear to me, in the past few weeks, that Tiffany Shlain's movie is the story of humanity, and recent history in particular, leading up to the healthy resurgence of direct democracy in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street - triggered, stimulated, facilitated by the advent of social media, or what I call New New Media.  Which is what I'll be talking about when I lead a discussion with the audience after the October 19, Wednesday, 7:15pm screening, at The Angelika.