In the late 1960’s the Biafran War appeared on the front pages of the world’s media partly due to a well co-ordinated advertising campaign using the relatively new broadcast marketing techniques.
During the mid 1980s the Ethopian famine was bought to prominence by Live Aid and Bob Geldof using music videos and live television made possible by huge leaps in broadcasting technology.
Nearly thirty years later we see an African tragedy – this time the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa – again bought to the West’s attention through new media and advances in video technology.
Each time there’s been an outpouring of outrage and determination by those of us in the West to ‘fix’ Africa’s problems. We demand our leaders do something so we march, we donate and these days we retweet or like an online video.
In many ways we’re like Alden Pyle, the idealistic and well meaning anti-hero of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American who believed a ‘third force’ can fix the problems of Vietnam in the 1950s.
At the time Graham Green wrote The Quiet American in the late 1950s, the Eisenhower Administration had several hundred US military advisers in Vietnam, sent by President Truman at the beginning of the decade.
Today, at the time of the Stop Kony campaign in 2012, the Obama Administration has ‘about’ a hundred advisors in Central Africa.
Sometimes we don’t reinvent anything; we just use modern tools to repeat our grandparents’ mistakes.
I really enjoy reading these pieces Paul. Please keep them coming.
The Internet, low cost hardware and Open Source Software all combine to provide the means by which it is possible to rapidly accellerate societal advancement in developing countries.
The big question has to be, “Are our leaders sufficiently technologically adept to adroitly harness this power for good?”