Voluntouring on Facebook and Instagram: Photography and social media in constructing the ‘Third World’ experience

Abstract

This article studies photographic practices in 'voluntourism' alongside the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The advent and widespread use of social media platforms today complicates the ethics of photographic practices, as the ease of sharing photographs accentuates and stirs up the unequal relations between the photographer and the photographed. From a conceptual standpoint, the moral and altruistic underpinnings of volunteer work supposedly differentiate voluntourists from their counterparts in mainstream tourism, who are often assumed to be engaged in commoditized and leisure-based activities. However, existing research suggests that voluntourists do participate in conventionally touristic practices, as the pervasiveness of photography illustrates. Using interviews with 16 voluntourists, this article examines the negotiations behind photo-taking and photo-posting in voluntourism. We also consider the case of Barbie Savior, a satirical Instagram account featuring 'the doll that saved Africa'. The emergence of such online media articles that critique and make fun of voluntourists' depiction of their Third World experience therefore becomes a self-governing mechanism for how one should behave in encountering the Third World, even as voluntourism itself continues to be seen as a viable way of caring for the Third World.

“Gazing” and “performing”: Travel photography and online self-presentation

“…For example, when Lo and McKercher (2015) requested participants to describe their travel-related picturing practices and displayed their previous posts on a laptop to support such recollection, the majority still “had great difficulty verbalizing their reasons” and resorted to “top of mind comments” (p. 110). Sin and He (2019) similarly reflected that some participants found it tough to express their motivations for taking or sharing certain photographs, with one participant pushing back slightly: “What do you want me to say? [laughter] I don’t know why I took these photos” (p. 230).…”

“…During post-excursion interviews, the author questioned “whether there was anything they felt they could not take pictures of and the almost unanimous response was ‘no’” (p. 15). In retrospective accounts, Sin and He (2019) invited Singaporean undergraduates to browse through photographs they had posted on Facebook and Instagram to represent their international volunteer excursions in Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. As above, participants referred to images of children but seemed wary of “painting children in host communities as powerless and passive,” opting to depict them as “poor but happy” instead (p. 227).…”

Communicating Ethical Engagement Abroad: A Content Analysis of Service-Learning Study Abroad Third-Party Provider Websites

“…Campaigns like Humanitarians of Tinder on Tumblr and Barbie Savior on Instagram poke fun at the practice of sharing images online that blur the lines between service, tourism, and exploitation and propagate myths about people and problems in developing countries (Schwarz & Richey, 2019). In a study published in 2019, Sin and He discovered that these types of satirical campaigns may be succeeding in raising some students' consciousness about the types of photos they post and how they depict their service abroad (Sin & He, 2019).…”

The transmedia tourist: A theory of how digitalization reinforces the de-differentiation of tourism and social life

“…Studies among ‘voluntourists’, that is, tourists engaged in volunteer work, show that the ‘use of social media platforms today complicates the ethics of photographic practices, as the ease of sharing photographs accentuates and stirs up the unequal relations between the photographer and the photographed’ (Sin and He, 2019: 215). Similarly, research on urban explorers, a type of alternative tourists striving to find, explore and document abandoned and derelict buildings and off-grid places, has identified different registers of ‘reflexive hesitation’ related to the aesthetic, place-political and ethical dilemmas of predicting what might be the implications of picture taking and online circulation (Jansson, 2018b).…”