Posted on 25 April 2013
In 2012 a California-based organisation launched a video campaign against the Ugandan leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army; an experiment that attracted 100 million viewers. The Kony 2012 campaign, run by Invisible Children, has been studied by Professor Archon Fung from the Harvard Kennedy School. He compared it to other US-based online campaigns to draw out their similarities and determine what their success means for democracy.
“They have a common structure of a political entrepreneur making a request that then spreads virally,” Fung says, explaining that in order for a message to go viral the average viewer must repeat the message to more than 1.2 other people. The ‘requests’ are vastly different – Kony 2012 called for the arrest and prosecution of an alleged war criminal, while a campaign run by Planned Parenthood, a sexual and reproductive health organisation, fought against funding cuts by the Susan G. Komen Foundation. The element they have in common, Fung says, is creativity.
“The people in the audience participate creatively in the restructuring of that message, or the emphasis of that message. You see this most prominently in the Planned Parenthood campaign; very early on the main messages that constituted the campaign were the stories of women who had used these health clinics,” Fung says.
While using supporters’ views to advance a campaign is nothing new, online or offline, Fung says the health organisation’s approach to engagement played a key role in the campaign’s success: “These stories were generated by the women themselves and sometimes they spread all by themselves, but very frequently Planned Parenthood was extremely savvy in listening for the best stories and then using its influence to spread those outwards.”
This led to a form of co-creation of the message, which Fung argues is increasingly important to young people. While a high level of active engagement worked for Planned Parenthood – the Susan G. Komen Foundation reversed its decision and continued funding the organisation’s breast cancer screenings – Fung says that such an approach is not appealing to all.
“Think about a company, a political campaign or a trade union trying to carry out a campaign of this sort. I think most of those organisations would be very reluctant to co-create and outsource their messaging in that way. We know that those organisations place a very high premium on maintaining control of the messaging,” he explains.
The importance of offline activism
Fung’s research has focused on the rapid spreading of particular messages online, although he says that this could not have been possible without a high level of offline activity before launching a message. “Invisible Children had been doing a lot of offline activity building networks - those networks formed the critical mass for the initial views and spreads of the Kony 2012 video. Similarly, Planned Parenthood relied on members and people who used clinical services, and even Pipa-Sopa relied heavily on very large organisations like Wikipedia and Google,” he says.
The Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) are laws which were proposed in the US and led to an online campaign in January 2012. This included a 24-hour blackout of English-language Wikipedia which was viewed 162 million times. Over 115,000 websites were reported to have participated, resulting in the two acts losing significant support. In both Pipa-Sopa and other viral engagements, Fung argues the offline element was key to the outcome.
The consequences for democracy
Such viral engagements improve the quality of democracy, Fung argues, firstly by expanding the scope of inclusion through the sheer number of people exposed to an issue. Furthermore, Fung says that greater political equality is achieved as people are given an equal opportunity for political influence.
Yet as viral engagements involve little more than watching a short video or signing an online petition, some have questioned their contribution to democracy. But for Fung, viral engagements bring new arguments to a debate and create a network of people for future action. “What the political entrepreneurs are doing is building large lists of participants and hoping to engage these people later on,” he says, “If organisations have the capacity they will be trying to develop these low-intensity participants into more engaged ones, asking them to take on more demanding kinds of action.”
Such development is in its infancy, but Fung says political organisations and advocacy groups are exploring how to use digital technology to advance their aims: “The future is open and a lot depends on what organisations find successful; they are paying much attention to the potential of virality.”
(Text by Rosie Scammell)
Archon Fung was visiting the EUI to give a lecture organised by the Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies.