3rd Draft Scolarly Article

Nina Blythe

Dr. Tinberg

English 101

Invisible Children

Pepper, Shayne. "Invisible children and the cyberactivist spectator." Nebula 6.4 (2009): 40+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.

In his essay Pepper analyzes Invisible Children and their and cyberactivist movement. He gives a full background on the foundation and tells the reader what it’s all about. He shows how the Invisible Children founders spread their important message in new ways that no other foundations have done before. They took videos and posted them on Google Video and social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. They developed their own website and let people know that just by watching the film they can become an activist. On every DVD came a list of things that the viewer could do to help the cause such as liking the videos on you tube, passing the DVD on to friend, donating money to the website, posting the video to your social networking profile, or wearing the merchandise to raise awareness.

 This attracted thousands of young people and is still continuing to grow on the internet , but recently they have held events to raise awareness and donate money to the cuase. He talks about the use of internet to draw young people in which lead to a speedy awareness of the cuase. By watching the video so many people felt moved and wanted to give back. So the founders gave free and easy solutions that supporters could do right from their computer. This whole foundation was an example of cyberactivism. Everything done by the Invisible Children was done through the internet, they were a mixture of Internet-enahanced and Internet-based."(3) Since cyberactivism could mean anything from creating a website for breast cancer awareness to hacking state department computers in China to protest human rights violations, Sandor Vegh has created useful categories in which to think about cyberactivism. He separates strategies as either Internet-enhanced or Internet-based. Vegh distinguishes the two by stating that Internet-enhanced strategies "are only used to enhance the traditional advocacy techniques, for example, as an additional communication channel, by raising awareness beyond the scope possible before the Internet, or by coordinating action more efficiently." On the other hand, Internet-based strategies are "only possible online, like a virtual sit-in or hacking into target web sites."