Hey everyone! I'm a white 20-something male college student with an internet connection, and I'm here to make a difference in the world! See, there's this really bad stuff happening in Africa, with this guy, Kony, and he's stealing kids and raping them and that's just not ok with me. So watch a video and tell those Africans how to do things, because its important that my white-person-western-voice is heard!
What?
Here's some statistics about the internet:
30.2% of the global population uses the internet.Of that number 78% of that group is in North America, while only 11.4% is in Africa. (internetworldstatistics.com).
So... only a third of the world has access to the internet, and only a tenth of that population is in Africa. Then why is it that all of a sudden we internet-laden white folks here in the US have decided to "do something" about an issue that, first of all, is on the other side of the world, and second of all, isn't our fight to begin with?
(Also, according to the 2009 US census, 31.3% of American citizens also lack access to the internet at home. The people most likely to live in a home without internet access are African Americans, Hispanics, and those with less than a high school education.)
This post is, as you may've guessed, inspired by the Kony2012 campaign (which honestly, to me, sounds like a vote FOR Kony, not against). The critiques of the campaign are numerous, many of them coming from African voices themselves, including Ugandan activists and ministers. The reality of the situation is that Joseph Kony isn't actually in Uganda at all, at the moment, and his army is comparatively small, at this point. It was much larger four years ago. Meanwhile, the Ugandan government has attempted two peace treaties in the last decade with the Lords Resistance Army, and at present the African Union is working to establish offices in the region to address these and related issues.
My problem with all this is that we in the west, with our laptops and our iPads and blah-dee-blah, have found a new way to colonize. The internet. The Kony2012 campaign dangerously maintains a theme of white-man-knows-best, without adequately addressing the history and actual local voices of the issues. Its easy for us to use our convenient wifi connections (just find a homeless person aka wifi hotspot!) and infinite little techy devices and think that we're "making a difference", but in reality we're perpetuating a belief that "Africans" (in quotes because there are A LOT of people in Africa and we also have a knack for lumping them together as if a continent were just one country) aren't able to voice for themselves or take care of themselves. We operate under the assumption that our privileged internet-laden cultural approach is the best one and the most effective one. Simultaneously, we fail to use the tools we're so lucky to have in any effective or meaningful way. Our endless devices are often held up as these great connectors; we have all this information right at our fingertips! But what are we doing with it?
Facebooking, tweeting pictures of cats, and now, telling people in Uganda how they should do things. Its a new, efficient colonialism. Look at the information we want, and ignore the rest. Meanwhile, we lose or never gain the ability to actually think critically about the information we have so readily available to us, to synthesize and retain it. We know it will just be there, so why bother?
The problem here is illustrated by the Kony2012 campaign: it's easy to watch a video with lots of moody music and click on things and share them to Facebook. Its a lot harder to delve into the issues, to study up on Ugandan history and geography, to learn about the area and the various changes that have happened in the region. We feel good when we click these seemingly activist things- look how active I am, I clicked and shared! my voice was heard!- because it's easier than actually changing anything about how we relate to knowledge, and by extension, the world around us.
The internet is a dangerous angel- without a doubt, it has been a powerful tool in making visible changes in the contemporary world. But usually those changes are made by people using it as a part of a larger activist project surrounding their own lives and issues, not just as a passive way to set-aside the actual thoughts that must-needs coincide with any action for social change. Sure, my blog here is nice, but am I doing anything else to shift my behaviors? Or am I just writing fancy and academic-sounding things, and then going back to playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends? Are you?
Clicking on things doesn't do a whole lot to make change; more often than not, it maintains a neo-colonial status quo. Those of us with the internet are in a global minority. Lets not lose sight of our privilege as we get lost in the intertubes and our own self-righteousness.