Last week, the big buzz (after Limbaugh) was the Invisible Children video to get indicted Uganda war criminal Joseph Kony prosecuted. The 30 min video has gone viral with more than 70 million views tonight (March 11). There are lots of criticisms of the video as an effective tool, but one thing's undeniable. This video raised a lot, a lot of money.
The sf point? Nicola Griffith in Slow River, 1995 (jeez, 1995) has her protagonist put together a video to raise money for a made up cause. In this book's future, young, wealthy people compete for who can send the most money the quickest to any online charity solicitation. They don't necessarily care about, or even know, what the charity's about; it's an intragroup competition.
I do think the people contributing to Invisible Children's Kony2012 care about the horrors in Uganda and are generally interested in doing something to help. But as I read about the video (and watched about half of it), I was reminded that there's an abstract quality to this giving. We're tossing money from over here, with the faith that it's going to do some good over there.
This seems to be my week for worrying about the complex and hard to solve problems of this world.
No comments:
Post a Comment