The Radiopants Dance

thisdanobrien:

cracked:

Be as cynical as you want about Invisible Children, but for fuck’s sake, if they didn’t exist then 80,000,000 people would instead be having long, pointless conversations about which cat videos should go in this week’s list of the top fucking cat videos of the stupid fucking week.

Yeah, Invisible…

I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, but I think 80,000,000 people talking about a thing is absolutely meaningless. Talking about a thing is super easy, (see: talking about writing a movie/talking about losing weight/talking about being a better person), and doing a thing is super hard, (see: writing a movie/consistently working out/being a better person). If there was some kind of statistic out there that proved that the 80,000,000 people who are talking are actually working on real, tangible, physical change, (or, hell, if the majority even understood what kind of change was necessary, [which, hell, how could they?]), then I’d shut my mouth. But I don’t hear 80,000,000 people saying “This is a complex issue— obfuscated by sensationalist reporting and now rampant schadenfreude— and here is what I can do to actively help,” I hear people saying “Hey, Kony, am I right? At least we’re talking about it.” 

As long as we keep saying “80,000,000 people talking about [X] is a good thing for [X],” those people will do nothing but talk, because we’ve convinced them and ourselves that talking “about a thing” is actually valuable. It almost never is.

That’s all. This Tumblr will now return to its regularly scheduled programming of occasionally answering questions, jokes, and shameless self-promotion, (speaking of: New Column Today!).

I agree that doing something is more important than talking about something, but I really disagree that talking about something is meaningless. That’s how things are figured out. The conversation is being had in order to figure out what to actually do, or whether or not something should even be done. Talking about writing a movie is meaningless, yes. But talking about what your movie is going to be about is how you end up writing a movie. It’s the difference between “Yeah, I’m going to write a movie” and “I’m trying to write a movie, but I don’t know if it should be about X or Y or if maybe I should make X happen, or Y not happen, etc.” No, conversation doesn’t get things done. Conversation doesn’t equal action, but it is the pathway to action. You can say “talk is cheap” (I am aware that you, Dan, didn’t actually say that), but how are you going to decide what to do if you don’t talk about what you should do? Talk is cheap if you only talk. Talk is valuable if it leads to action.

I don’t have the statistics you’re talking about because, no, I don’t think they exist. Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I do think that talking is better than ignoring or not knowing. And I know that I have friends back home who teach 12-year-olds and those 12-year-olds were shown the Kony2012 video and now they’re having conversations about the subject. When I was twelve, I had conversations about Jedi and, well, that’s probably it. Maybe these kids won’t actually do anything about it when they grow up, but because of this video, kids are having complex thoughts about complex issues concerning kids on the other side of the planet, long before most of us ever did.That is good. Maybe they’ll forget about it all when The Avengers comes out. But maybe when they’re old enough, they’ll remember talking and then they’ll act.