For as long as humans have existed, we have been obsessed with vanity. When the way we were able to document our beauty was by commissioning a painter to do a portrait, those who could afford it had obscene amounts of paintings of themselves plastered to their walls. When the camera was invented, people wanted to use it to take photos of themselves. It was only natural that a selfie phenomenon would come from the presence of an accessible and high quality camera, especially when that camera was strapped to our hips in the form of a cell phone.
That being said, selfies are really wonderful ways of improving self-esteem and capturing moments with friends. However, with online culture, many social media influencers have started to become desensitized to certain things. Logan Paul’s “Suicide Forest” video showed the corpse of a man who had killed himself, which is clearly in bad taste. Apparently, it was time for Instagram influencers to have a turn at being problematic.
Many people have been visiting places of extreme tragedy, like Auschwitz. These visits include a tour, learning the history behind the site and taking photographs for personal documentation. Photos taken with respect are one thing, but many Instagram users who visit the aforementioned sites have begun taking selfies at these locations. These selfies are almost always in bad taste. Whether your caption on social media is respectful or not, the idea of taking a selfie on a site where people died, were tortured or experienced extreme emotional distress and then trying to translate that into validation or appreciation through a social media post is extremely disrespectful.
This is not to say that social media is a direct causation of desensitization towards terrifying events. In fact, many social media platforms allow unpopular or non-American news of importance to be spread, that major news networks do not want to or cannot cover. Social media can be a useful tool for making friends, learning new information and documenting memories that you want to share with people in your life.
Making something that should be a somber trip of learning and remembrance of lost lives can be documented to social media if it must be. Those interested in posting photos of their emotionally draining trips and educating their followers on tragedies should avoid putting themselves into the photo. By putting someone into the photo, the photo will become about them, regardless of the caption.
The solution to this problem is to hold influencers accountable. If an account with a few thousand followers posts an insensitive selfie, then their few thousand followers think it is alright to post a photo where they take the location of something devastating and make it about them. The best way to stop problematic behavior is to draw attention to it, educate and try to ensure that it does not happen again.
