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See more of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal.

See more of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal

Which brings back some pretty fond memories. A lot of kids like me spent hours, hours leaning over their Etch A Sketches, twisting knobs with painstaking care, slowly creating images that would then vanish with a quick invert-and-shake. It was a lesson in impermanence and the virtue of nonattachment... and, at a less spiritual level, the ability to move your hands in one location to draw in another.

Thanks to those hours of Etch A Sketching, when the time came to operate a mouse for the first time, my brain wasn't completely thrown. I not only recognized the separate location of movement and visual feedback, but welcomed it. And for a kid who'd managed to verrrrry carefully create the U.S.S. Enterprise with two knobs and a free Saturday afternoon, those first windowed interfaces held no terrors.

There may be some synchronicity at work in the timing of Etch A Sketch's sudden surge in renown. It speaks to the 2-D image's newfound status, whether it's found in the explosive growth of Pinterest, the popularity of infographics, the increased emphasis on data visualization, the White House whiteboard (and Edward Tufte's role as a White House advisor), or the growing prominence of visual practitioners like Dan Roam and Sunni Brown.

Communicating visually crosses boundaries of language and literacy; it conveys ideas quickly and memorably; and it creates social objects for resharing, pinning and posting. Of course, it's also open to spectacular abuse; a little fiddling with colors, shapes or proportions, and you can create a highly persuasive but deeply misleading image.

All of this suggests to me that we might want to revisit our schools' curricula. We place a lot of emphasis - rightly - on reading and writing skills, on how to construct a sentence and organize an outline and structure an essay. Visual communication doesn't get nearly the same attention, which means we aren't teaching kids (or adults) how to communicate effectively with images. And we definitely aren't giving them the critical skills to know when an image is lying to them.

Visual communication is rapidly becoming crucial for anyone who wants to explain, persuade or inform... and that's an awful lot of us. And we should be encouraging kids to develop the skills involved.

And until curricula make that leap, sitting down with them over an Etch A Sketch may not be a bad first step.

See more of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal

Suddenly, I'm surrounded by notifications. Three new email messages. Five things just happened on Facebook. Four people have mentioned, DM'd or retweeted me on twitter. Six Google+ alerts. LinkedIn on the iPhone now feels the need to notify me that I can always check it to see what my contacts are up to. (That has to be the ultimate meta-reminder: an app reminding you that it still exists.)

And if I still don't feel like I have the pulse of my system at my fingertips, I can install a shareware utility to notify me of all sorts of involuntary muscle movements on the part of my operating system and applications: "Backup complete." "Word just updated itself." "Photoshop just completed peristalsis."

And it's all too much. Because every one of those notifications conveys the same red-badged "deal-with-me-NOW" sense of extreme urgency, whether it's a DM that my house is on fire and I should do something about it, or the announcement of the new Rabid Parakeet in Angry Birds. When everything's important, nothing's important.

The first few times I experienced notifications, I felt like the Terminator, with that cool heads-up display constantly alerting me to my surroundings, feeding me tactical data. After a while, though, it just feels like being 10 years old in the back seat with a pesky sibling who keeps poking you in the side.

Besides, once I have badges on my iPhone apps with numbers like "62" on them, the game is lost anyway, and all that those notifications are doing is rubbing salt into the wound.

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But along with that conversation, there's also been some disdain for the thousands of thousands of young people who were moved to participate for the first time on any issue, let alone an international one. "Slacktivism" is the insult of choice. And the risk is that drowning their enthusiasm in derision will turn them off activism altogether. Or it may further alienate them from the organizations and approaches that are building lasting, long-term progress on self-determination, self-reliance and social justice - the kind that takes the big picture into mind.

Can those organizations learn from Invisible Children's viral success? That would be ideal - but it's not like they can treat the approach as a template. Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman says it well:

The Kony story resonates because it's the story of an identifible individual doing bodily harm to children. It's a story with a simple solution, and it plays into existing narratives about the ungovernability of Africa, the power of US military and the need to bring hidden conflict to light.... What are the unintended consequences of the Invisible Children narrative? The main one is increased support for Yoweri Museveni, the dictatorial and kleptocratic leader of Uganda....

As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we're learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign's value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children's campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response?

In the changing world of volunteer activism - particularly with the rise of social networks - non-profits are finding they have to change too, often fundamentally. That's one of the key insights of Beth Kanter and Allison Fine's book The Networked Nonprofit, which argues organizations have to become more open, and engage with their supporters more as peers and free agents than as volunteers slotted into pre-defined roles.

Harnessing the energy of a #kony2012 - and ensuring it does more good than harm - is one more challenge they're facing.

See the complete archive Noise to Signal cartoons here. Creative-Commonsified for your sharing pleasure.