What's the Power of a Meme?

The viral success of a 30-minute video detailing the crimes of Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony has sparked two major debates online.

The first, laid out in great detail by our colleagues at The Atlantic, is whether the organization that produced the video, Invisible Children, is really the best recipient of your anti-LRA donations.

The second is whether a "net roots" campaign like the one Invisible Children is waging against Kony and on behalf of people in Uganda and other areas ravaged by the LRA actually does any good.

The Atlantic analysis does a solid job of tackling the first question, noting Invisible Children's arguable flaws as a charitable organization -- essentially that more of its revenue goes toward filmmaking, related projects and management expenses than to programs that benefit people on the ground.

The article doesn't draw any conclusions, though, noting that what you think of Invisible Children basically comes down to the value you place on creating viral videos about important topics.

And that gets to the heart of the second debate. What is the value of 40 million YouTube views if, in their wake, the LRA conflict remains as intractable as it has been for the past two decades?

The cynic's take is that most viral Internet memes are fluff, just passing fancies with about as much heft as a basket of #LongWarmBreadsticks. When something like the LRA's history of terrorizing villages, torturing opponents and recruiting child soldiers goes viral, they say, it debases the issue at worst, and, at best, merely convinces well-meaning but uninvolved people that their liking and retweeting it is making a difference.

Indeed, extensive media coverage and public outrage at the Darfur conflict -- much of it Internet enabled -- did little to make the conflict less intractable. And the outrage at Kony's atrocities is unlikely to spark a major push for more foreign aid or other commitments from the U.S. public, which is at its most isolationist in 25 years.

Despite the occasional high-flying meme, the Internet hasn't fundamentally changed levels of U.S. civic engagement, at least as of a 2009 Pew Study.

But even if the Kony2012 campaign does nothing but educate, that's hardly a net negative.

Perhaps the power of Internet engagement shouldn't be measured against a standard so high.

The White House arguably clinched a deal to extend the payroll tax cut last year by getting #40dollars, the approximate average per-paycheck loss from not extending the tax cut, to trend on Twitter. An online campaign by Google and others, also likely contributed to the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House.

Sites like Kickstarter have turned many small donation campaigns into successful projects.

Numerous other Internet engagement schemes have fared less well, though, and the activists themselves haven't developed a solid sense of what will trend and what won't -- as clearly evidenced by the widespread amazement that a video as long as Invisible Children's could hold the public attention.

Perhaps as online campaigning hits middle age, a better protocol will develop for how to make a campaign successful. And perhaps campaigners will develop a better sense of what to do once online success arrives.