What you see above this text is a screenshot of something that is truly as interesting as it is scary. It is a graph of the amount of times that "Kony" was searched in Google. For those of you who are unfamiliar the Kony that is being searched is the Joseph Kony or the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. The LRA are infamous for taking children and forcing them to serve as soldiers in this man's army. Horrendous right? It is, he is terrible person who should be brought to justice and something truly needs to be done to stop him. Well this is what is interesting about this graph, and what is interesting is that this trend of spiking and then dropping back to almost nothing a month later was also common on other websites, Facebook, Twitter as well as major news outlets were all full of statuses, tweets and stories about Kony and his child soldiers. Why I bring this up is to make the point that it was everywhere, everyone knew about Kony and the LRA even if they couldn't point to Uganda on a map. There was a mass influx in every form of media on this topic, and then as fast as it blew up, it died out. You can see how a week after the spike, the Google searches are back to almost pre-spike levels, people just we're not searching for info on this man anymore. This whole experience could almost be the topic of a doctoral thesis in psychology, how the internet has desensitized us as humans. We are becoming inundated with knowledge every time we get online and it may not be a good thing for us. We have the attention span of goldfish nowadays, this Kony thing is not an isolated incidence. Remember the Fukushima reactor in Japan, or the Deep-water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf? Both had similar trends, an immediate explosion of attention, interest, and donations and then it's as if it never happened. I'm sure that if you were in the middle of these disasters you wouldn't be so apathetic, but the fact that we are able to know that terrible things are happening in the world, want to help in some way and then as soon as the news stops covering the story, forget it even happened is extremely alarming. Just thought that maybe you all may have your own thoughts on this, feel free to share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kony
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