The Kony 2012 Campaign Highlights An Even Bigger Problem Among Us

        To me, Facebook is like the local pub. Most people pop in just after work for a while, even if they've already stopped by briefly during their lunch-break, and spend most of their time complaining about how their manager could be replaced by a scaffolding pole, with no noticeable difference. There's the person who seems to enjoy making out that their life is so dramatically bad that the people of Darfur should take a break from being shot to hold a charity concert for them. There's the clown who spends far too much time thinking of witty one-liners to belt out at random (that'll be me, then) and let's not forget that ever lovely person sitting in the corner who waits until it's late before starting a massive rant about something or other and blaming every problem in his life on "political correctness" or "immigration", followed normally by an argument. You still get the charity tin rattlers, but on Facebook, they're soliciting for "likes" instead of money. Plus, it provides ample opportunity for people to awkwardly run into their ex.


        Thing is, if my local pub had to close for a couple of hours to refit a door, I don't think the English language contains the words to sum up my sheer indifference. There are a million things I can do while I wait a couple of hours. I can use a major excavation project to clear out my nostrils, I can go shopping, or I can spend the time wondering if Oxygen really deepens our voice, and helium actually brings it back to normal? Whatever, the point is that of the many things that would happen, one of them wouldn't be it appearing as front-page news, as Facebook going down did yesterday. Really, people? I have this image that, for a few hours, people were wondering the streets in a zombie-like daze, wondering where all the "log-in" features were on all the shops, and if they should be scared or not of the burning ball that sits in the sky. But, now that it's alive again, the Internet is ringing with such vocabulary as LOL, OMG, and a new one that I think should exist; CASBMNNAIWRTF (crack a smile but make no noise as it wasn't really that funny).

        Something new has made its way to everyone's accounts as of yesterday, however. It's a video from YouTube, nothing odd yet, that's 30 minutes long. This is normally a killer for a YouTube video, as people tend to get bored of anything that's longer than 27 nanoseconds, but in two days 19 million people have seen it! In fact, if you've been online in the last couple of days, you've probably heard of it already. The video is called "Kony 2012"! Basically, it works to explain who Joseph Kony is. To save you the bother, and Wikipedia the bandwidth, I'll explain. So basically he's this guy in Uganda who runs an outfit called the "Lords Resistance Army", who want to set up a theocratic state. However, somehow they've managed to convince themselves that the way to achieve this is to kidnap tens of thousands of kids and turn them into soldiers. Then, it's simply a matter of convincing them to commit some of the most mind-boggling acts of cruelty against their countrymen, for reasons that nobody is entirely sure of. So not someone who you'd offer a high-five to. He's even on Interpol's "Most Wanted Criminals" list, and the number one spot! The guys who made the video are basically trying to make him a household name, so that the Government will see "doing something about him" as a vote-winner. Now don't get me wrong, I support what the guys who made the awareness video trying to do in making people aware that such a monster exists, and at 400,000 views an hour, they seem to be quite successful at it, but I think this video has highlighted another massive problem with society.

        Instead of my Facebook timeline being filled up with "I'm glad that this is getting a bigger priority", it was instead filled with "what's this Kony thing?". I asked around, and out of everyone I knew, three people could explain who he was. Three! This would normally baffle me, and I'd fill this page with metaphors and then go have some lunch, but this doesn't baffle me; it saddens me. The other day, I heard the phrase "nuclear fission" and I didn't know how it worked. So, I looked it up. Twenty minutes later, I knew the fundamentals. Never before has a generation had literally every single piece of information on everything at our fingertips, or in our pockets. Previous generations would have fought wars to get this level of intellectual freedom! Now we have it for £15.99 a month including line-rental and advertised by that kid from My Family, so do we feed what should be a constant appetite for knowledge and understanding? No! We're all too busy playing with our imaginary Facebook farms, or cheering at the odd creatures on The Only Way Is Essex. Here, we have a monster that has been kidnapping children, no less, for the last 26 years! We all should have learned about this a decade ago. We should have all demanded that he be hunted down by every Government and handed over to the Hague. Instead, we've simply not cared enough to even bother to look it up. The Internet has given us the power to do this, and for years we've just simply not bothered. That's not even sad; that's a travesty! It's a stain on our society that all those who could have valued knowledge or changed the world for the better instead opted to tune out and gawp at some Z-list celebrity as they skate on ice in exchange for scores.

        So this evening, don't bother with EastEnders. Don't bother with whatever "turn-on-TV, switch-off-brain" nonsense you normally have on. Instead, take advantage of possibly the greatest resource to ever fall into our hands.

        Because if all we are going to use it for is mis-spelled text on pictures of cute kittens, then quite frankly we don't deserve to have it.

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