A 5* Destination: the Creation of New Transnational Moral Spaces of Remembrance on TripAdvisor

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we demonstrate how the digital sphere and individual contributions within it add to a process of worldmaking by creating a new transnational moral order that reinforces notions of a transnational humanity and shared values. Specifically, tourists’ interactions in the digital sphere create a new moral space—in our analysis on the internet platform TripAdvisor.com—where they comment on their particular experience when visiting memorial sites of atrocities such as mass violence or genocide. This article contributes to approaches that see dark tourism not in terms of voyeurism or amorality but instead as a constituent part of moral meaning-making in individuals’ experiences of post-genocide spaces, expanding these arguments from the material visits of the tourists to their discussions in the digital sphere. This is affected by—yet at the same time contributes to and thus perpetuates—the transnationalisation of memory by which the way we remember and commemorate is increasingly becoming similar on a global scale. This transnationalisation is both forwarded by and constitutive of the digital sphere in which we study it. Empirically, this article draws on visitor reviews that were posted on the travel website TripAdvisor regarding the dark tourism sites Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Kigali Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda, expanding our understanding of responses to these memorial sites into the digital sphere.