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We Still Need to Bring Back the GirlsThe girls! The girls! Do you remember the girls? You wouldn't fucking shut up about them several months ago, but then some woman in a bikini tipped some ice over her head for MS or measles or something and man it's all just too much to keep track of. Wait, where were we again?2012 used to hold the record for the shallowest, most pathetic instance of internet campaigning with another hashtag you're about to remember for the first time in months, #Kony2012. #BringBackOurGirls started more promisingly, in the sense that the aim of the campaign was actually real. Never mind that the great Twitter mob hadn't given two shits about all the previous abductions of school children in Nigeria. Ignore the celebs weaseling their way into the story. The public turned up, and they were counted.For about a week.After that, it turned out that Boko Haram, the extremist Islamic militants who abducted the children and have killed thousands in recent years, didn't actually give a crap about Change.org petitions or hashtags, leaving a generation of young clicktivists utterly bewildered about how to proceed.Luckily, something easier came along—the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. All you had to do for that was tip some cold water over your head and not give any money for charity. Wet T-Shirts were donned, and "our girls" were forgotten.The benefits to charity were debatable, but the challenge gave us a moment of vintage Patrick Stewart. Easily the Internet's Man of the Year 2014 after his skewering of David Cameron's "call to Obama" tweet, Jean-Luc Picard showed us how charity should really work.So that was the internet in 2014. From charity to culture wars to gross acts of nudity, the human race is louder, angrier, shallower, and sometimes funnier than ever before. The stakes are getting higher every day.Follow Martin on Twitter.Alicia Keys for # Bring Back Our Girls pic.twitter.com/0nJYSfdlAK
— Nnenna Agba (@NnennaA) October 14, 2014