Other campaigns have used videos and social media to get their message out (consider the Enough Project's campaign against Congolese militias who fund their wars by controlling the trade in "Blood Minerals" such as coltan). But it takes more than having a message worth hearing...

A few nights ago, a video from advocacy group Invisible Children hit the web. Called Kony 2012, it is an attempt to tell the world the story of war criminal Joseph Kony, so that the viewer might feel the burn of injustice and work to put his reign of terror to an end.

In a world where attention scarcity has displaced access as the new information problematic, how do you get your issue noticed? This is precisely the question that confronted Invisible Children, the international NGO that produced the viral online video “Kony 2012.” Since its release on March 5, it has been nothing short of a sensation: within two days YouTube tallied over 11 million viewings. That number tripled by the following afternoon and presently – four days after release – the number exceeds 52 million.

Invisible Children has turned the myopic worldview of the adolescent -- "if I don't know about it, then it doesn't exist, but if I care about it, then it is the most important thing in the world" -- into a foreign policy prescription... Awareness of their plight achieved, child soldiers are now visible to the naked American eye.