Good morning my post today will be on dark tourism, social media and performance, meaning the effects of social media on dark tourism and vice versa.
Firstly I'll quickly recap the definition of dark tourism. Then I'll explain the inspiration for the post; the trend of public outrage at the inappropriate use of social media at sites of memory, specifically of the Holocaust. Then I’ll move on to the pros and cons of social media with reference to education, one of the pros that have been highlighted in scholarship is the educational possibilities of social media. Then I’ll move on to question whether Social Media is problematic for the remembrance of the Holocaust. Then I'd like to pose the question: what is the real reason that they visit these sites? Finally, to conclude I'd like to open up the discussion to you, the readers of whether there is a solution to the problems presented in the presentation?
What is dark tourism?
Any travel associated with death, disaster or the macabre
“Modern morality is encapsulated through the tourist gaze at mortality at ‘dark sites”
"dark tourism attempts to capture contemporary (re)presentations of the Significant Other dead within economic paradigms of business supply and consumer demand, as well as highlighting issues of dissonance, politics and historicity, and furthering our sociological understandings of death, the dead and collective memory."
Dark Tourism Themes, issues and Consequences: A Preface
I will try to focus on the idea of morality and furthering sociological understandings of death specifically in the presentation.
So a few years ago I came across this project called the ‘Yolocaust’ which, as you can see in the video below, was created by a German Jewish satirist shaming tourists who had posted photos of them posing on the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin by using Photoshop. Obviously like an element of dark humour and satire here, but it was a very controversial project in the end and that has since been taken down.
This came back into my head as I woke up the other day and it made me think about the relationship between social media and dark tourism and to jog my memory on this video I quickly Google searched the words “Holocaust Memorial disrespect” into Google and was met with many articles on the topic so the original video that I saw a few years ago is definitely not the only one anymore. Even a story as recent as Monday morning concerning a Tik Tok video shows that the issue is still ongoing. The Tik Tok video was on the ‘Influences in the wild’ page which is quite popular, someone had managed to capture on video a German influencer modelling with a professional photographer on the concrete slabs of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Are there Positives to Social Media?
Now that I've given you a back story for this post, I'd like to talk about the positives of social media because I have found articles that argue for the use of social media at dark tourist sites or historical sites of memory. Some important quotes that I found from my reading are as follows;
“[Instagram] It is the main communication platform for young people, and also for communication about the past” (Adriaansen, 2020)
“Dismissing the educational potential of social media altogether implies holding on to a normative framework of history (Adriaansen, 2020)
Generation of Holocaust survivors is diminishing, so the emotional connection to the past is fading, social media can be a way for us to connect personally to the past (Bareither, 2020)
So the emotional connection to the past is fading and perhaps social media can be a way for us to connect personally to that past. Furthermore, I would like to comment on accessibility because Instagram is free and so anyone with a smartphone can create content, which means that many news stories that aren’t covered in mainstream media are told through this form of ‘alternative media’ now and we saw a lot of this during the Black Lives Matter movement last year. Much information on the protests and police brutality wasn't covered in MMM but a lot of information was shared on Twitter or Instagram. Unfortunately, this sort of liberalists outlook of social media can become problematic because of its then surplus of resources, which means many stories or pages are overlooked and others promoted for the wrong reasons which obviously leads to fake news.
Is Social Media Problematic for the remembrance of historical events?
This leads to one of my arguments against the educational potential of social which is - why are we relying on social media to educate the masses? Is this a result of neoliberal ideas of education in which an individual is entirely responsible for their own education? Why are we focusing on individual responsibility for something like curriculum redesign which gives collective responsibility for education? I think it is a tragic result of institutionalised and prejudiced mass media and probably of the education system. Are influencers really supposed to be the teachers now?
It leads me to the question, is Instagram problematic for remembering the Holocaust?
So, this idea of posing at memorials has also been highlighted in a documentary filmed by Sergei Loznitsa called Austerlitz and not just show I'll just play the trailer quickly at its. There is something incredibly sinister about the shots from this documentary film that was released in 2016 which documented tourists’ behaviours at for me former Nazi concentration camps and this kind of leads onto my next question: what is the real reason for visiting these sites of memory in commemoration of the holocaust?
The director himself stated in a New York Times interview that the people who came to these places 40 years ago came with a different purpose than people now and the interviewer in the same article stated (Loznitsa, 2016), “the burden of the past feels officially heavy in Austerlitz as the camps are treated as just another pitstop on a sightseeing list” (Rapold, 2016). Unfortunately, it is hard to ever really know why people visit these places and if you ask people, I'm not sure how honest an answer we would get. I’m sure a lot of people would say they wanted to pay their respects, or they wanted to educate themselves.
However, I would like to propose an idea: are people going to these places to pay their respects or to learn or are they going to take a photo of that place to prove their morality to their followers?
If we go back to the influencer from Tik Tok, the top comments accused her of using the memorial for likes. Therefore, I would like to highlight the idea of dark tourism that was discussed last week; the idea that people go to visit these sites as a way of confirming their own morality and to tell other people that they had been there. It is a cynical argument, but I am a cynical person, but it leads to the idea of Performative Activism. It's quite a new term that's come with the social media age of people posting things on their social media to look good and show that they support a cause, but do they really care about the cause?
Thus, I want to propose the idea of performative activism within dark tourism; that people are going to these sites of commemoration like Auschwitz or the Berlin memorial to show their followers that they care about the Holocaust. I'm not accusing every tourist of this; I’m not saying that they don’t care at all about the Holocaust. But, like the director said, 40 years ago, when there were no social media, the people who visited were probably researchers or had ancestors who died in the Holocaust and were genuinely paying respect to those who were murdered. I don't think it will ever be possible to really know why because we have the obstacle of the Human Ego to contend with, but I do think that there's this added layer of social consciousness that has come with social media in general but that is quite obvious in the case of dark tourism as I wonder whether people are going just to say that they went and post it not just family and friends but an entire following of people.
Is there a solution to this problem? Is there a problem to begin with?
Bareikher (2020) states that “blaming ‘selfie culture’ and equating digital media practices with ‘superficial’ remembrance is much too simplistic”. On the other hand, Van Dillen (2019) proposes ‘Selfie bans’ at Dark Tourism sites.
I want to draw upon what the architect of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Peter Eisenman who said when the memorial first opened, he expected people to picnic in the field and for children to play there and he even acknowledges there will be fashion models modelling there and films will be shot there (2005). Now, this is something I want us to remember when we return to the Tik Tok video. But it's interesting that over 15 years ago Eisenman predicted that someone would be modelling at the memorial and this week, we've seen public outcry for an Instagram influencer modelling there. Eisenman acknowledges that it's not a sacred place to him but is it perhaps a sacred place for other people?
So, the architect didn’t mind what people really did with this memorial. But does a line need to be drawn? At the end of the day, this was opened in 2005, long before Instagram or really Facebook was popular. (Especially amongst Gen Z). Could Eisenman have predicted what we are dealing with today?
Bibliography
Adriaansen, R. J. (2020). Picturing Auschwitz. Multimodality and the attribution of historical significance on Instagram (Imaginando Auschwitz. La multimodalidad y la atribución de significado histórico en Instagram). Infancia y Aprendizaje, 43(3), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2020.1771963
Bareither, C. (2021). Difficult heritage and digital media: ‘selfie culture’ and emotional practices at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27(1), 57–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1768578
Blankenship, A. M. (2018). Jewish Tourism in Berlin and Germany’s Public Repentance for the Holocaust. Academica Turistica, 11(1), 117–126. https://doi.org/doi:10.26493/2335-4194.11.117-126
Craig Wight, A. (2020). Visitor perceptions of European Holocaust Heritage: A social media analysis. Tourism Management, 81(May), 104142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2020.104142
Kidron, C. A. (2013). Being there together: Dark family tourism and the emotive experience of co-presence in the holocaust past. Annals of Tourism Research, 41, 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.12.009
Roberts, C., & Stone, P. R. (2014). Dark Tourism and Dark Heritage: Emergent Themes, Issues and Consequences. In Displaced Heritage (NED-New edition, pp. 9-). Boydell & Brewer.
Xiang, Z., & Gretzel, U. (2010). Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism Management, 31(2), 179–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2009.02.016
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