The Free Radical

By now– I’m assuming– most have heard of Joseph Kony. If you’re not among the millions of recent viewers of this mini-documentary, you can get up to speed by viewing it here:

Kony 2012

Over the past three days the video has accumulated 37 million views! Pretty impressive for a topic which really has very little to do with our comfortable lives here in the Western world… and that, my friends, is the real story here.

I’m not going to get into the details about how bad Joseph Kony is, or how shady the organization which produced the video might be. There’s plenty of mainstream journalists and Internet bloggers doing just that. Rather, it is the fact of how quickly and thoroughly this thing went viral which really grabs my attention. It seems to me that there are legions of armchair revolutionaries out there who are just waiting for the chance to jump on the next “good cause” to come their way. And that’s GOOD… really, really good!

To me it’s a clear signal that people desperately want change, and they want to play a part in bringing about that change. Social media networking has made it ridiculously easy to do just that. From the comforts of our own homes we can inform ourselves and each other easily of the things that we personally think matter. And we can discuss solutions, organize them and finally implement them in the real world with some assurance that enough people do actually care that our efforts will make a difference.

Facebook has over 750 million users. That’s more than twice the population of the US… distributed throughout the world. That is potentially a powerful force! I know, I know, Facebook detractors will say that 90% or more of the stuff posted and shared on Facebook is meaningless drivel. And then there’s the whole privacy issue; social networks are used to spy on us, so we should avoid them. Bullshit! A knife can be used to prepare a gourmet meal, or it can be used to murder your neighbour. It’s the user who decides the actual functionality of the tool.

Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, and all the rest of the social networking sites are our golden opportunity. We get to decide how these tools will be used. We are only now beginning to explore the incredible potential here. And the beauty of it is that there’s no one ultimately in charge of these sites telling us what to post and share. We get to decide that. If we want to get serious for a moment, there’s nothing stopping us from sharing “Kony 2012.” In the next moment we can go back to sharing the latest video of some guy sacking himself with a broom handle.

For the first time, we get to decide what makes the evening news. Joseph Kony was all over the network news last night. Why? Because social media made it newsworthy. The story is more than twenty years old, but last night, through social networking, the public decided that this is real news and the networks had to pick up the story in order to maintain their last shreds of credibility. What else do you suppose we can force them to report on?

It happened a couple of months ago too. Do you remember the heart-wrenching video of Jonah Mowry? That sucker went viral in a matter of days too. Next thing you know, Jonah Mowry is on Good Morning America. If you’d have told Jonah the week before that he was going to be on national television he would have had absolutely no reason to believe you… and yet it happened… because we made it happen… by caring enough to share his story with our personal networks of friends. We wanted to help in whatever small way we could. And it had a huge impact!

People, we have power. Do not ever doubt it. And all we have to do to exercise that power is to communicate with each other, tell each other what we think matters and why. Sometimes a poignant video or photo or caption crosses our path and its message is so clear and obvious that we just have to share it. Then it goes viral and we instantly find out that millions of people all around the world feel exactly the same way we do… and we deepen our connections. First, maybe we just send them a “friend request.” Then maybe we organize groups and event pages around pet issues. The discussion gets rolling, and suddenly someone comes up with a brilliant real world solution… and there’s already a whole army of informed volunteers who would like nothing more than a chance to change the world.

Do you see how exciting this is? I’m going to admit to you right now that as I was writing this piece I was all choked-up the whole time. I’m blushing back tears because I’m so ecstatic! I can see so clearly the potential here. It’s huge, and we’re in control. If you agree with me, share this article on Facebook. Post it to Twitter. Mirror it on your blog. And even if you disagree, post it anyway and tell me why in the comments section.

We’ve got a lot of shit to work out. Let’s get busy!