On Friday, Nov. 13, two bombs were detonated in central Paris, which, along with a series of shootings, killed over 120 people and injured hundreds. The international response was swift: social media was overridden with cries of shock and sympathy, and within a few hours Facebook had introduced a filter of the French tricolour which users could superimpose on their profile pictures to “support France and the people of Paris.”
What the filter ended up catalyzing was an effluvia of old Paris vacation pictures and a wave of banal sentiments “in support” of petrified Parisian strangers. This show of social media solidarity backfired when many pointed out that while Facebook seemed to urge hollow commentary on the bombings in Paris, it neglected to raise awareness for two harrowing suicide bombings Beirut suffered one day prior. Many averred that the media somehow neglected to thoroughly cover Beirut, which — though contested by a thoughtful Vox article, which cites coverage by The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others — is true, in that the Beirut attack was not front-page news, as Paris was. It is also wholly unsurprising, considering that The New York Times’ international headquarters is in Paris, and other Western news organizations have expansive news corps in the French capital. The fact that Western media has stronger reactions to tragedies that occur in Western industrialized nations should shock no one. The fact that Facebook, with a majority of users in the United States, implemented measures to further engage its (mostly American) users and have them spend more time on the site, is similarly predictable.
What’s fascinating and strange is why people with little or no connection to France but for a brief sightseeing jaunt were so eager to somehow respond to the tragedy. The frenzy was impelled by a conception of Paris as a universal romantic fiction compounded by the pervasive social pressure to appear sympathetic to any and all tragedy or atrocity, resulting in a “slacktivism” that renders fruitless all efforts at expressing meaning.
Whether they had read about Beirut, the reason that Paris received such a voluminous social media response is that people don’t generally view Paris as the capital of a forcibly secular, somewhat racist country going through a “national-identity crisis” as it struggles to reconcile left-wing social policies and a damning colonial history with substantially shifting demographics. Like Botticelli’s Venus, Paris is a standalone fiction, a city of romance, art and a tempered, Caucasian foreignness Americans and Europeans can fantasize about and lay claim to. Paris is host to only the beautiful and the good: in 2013, it was the world’s most popular tourist destination; the rest of the world may fall to pieces, but, in the words of Rick Blaine, “we’ll always have Paris.”
To claim, then, that Beirut, as one Lebanese woman put it, is “another pretty city [just] like” Paris is to ignore the fact that the city, for many who “support” its people through social media, exists as artifice. Paris was chosen as the target for this very reason — according to ISIS, it is the embodiment of “France’s symbols of ‘perversity,’” the imagined paragon of ideals worshipped by the West.
The fact that it is common practice to conflate Middle Eastern countries and lump Iraq and Lebanon and Syria together as nations in a region doomed to perpetual violence is certainly reprehensible. But that, I believe, has less to do with the overwhelming response to Paris than the fact that the city looms larger in the public imagination than the Eiffel Tower does over the city itself. This, compounded by the modern pressure to appear both knowledgeable and involved, was what drove the frenzy of attempted “support” by people who were both spatially and culturally removed from the bombings.
Profile picture changes, Facebook hashtag campaigns — the poster child of which is probably the Kony 2012 debacle — indignant tweeting: these are all manifestations of “slacktivism,” wherein you “stand up” for any and all worthwhile causes by sitting at your laptop and liking, sharing and feeling virtuous at the click of a button. Because it is so easy to declare your “solidarity” with a variety of disenfranchised groups, there is almost a social expectation that you do so: regardless of how much you actually know — or care — about social issues, you too must look as though you are concertedly invested. The Internet “Social Justice Warrior” is the ultimate slacktivist, because he not only posts about championing causes with which he is superficially familiar but he goes further and criticizes others for not being hypersensitive to all instances of insufferable Internet injustice. Those who criticized Facebook and lambasted Western media for supposed indifference to atrocities in the Middle East were of this ilk; mourn for Beirut, they demanded. Mourn for Baghdad! Mourn for Syria! (Read: make more flag filters!) Only “praying for Paris” is selectively mourning, which for some reason is wrong, as though we should lay a flower on every grave in the graveyard rather than just on that of our loved one.
When did we start having to address all of the world’s problems? When did commitment and attention to one cause entail neglect of all others? To grieve for all is to grieve for none; to extend sympathy in all directions is to stretch ourselves so thin that our words lose all meaning, and we revert to the rhetoric of Miss America contestants who dream of “world peace.”
The world is now our digital village, its many and varied denizens our ostensible virtual neighbors. I cannot condemn those who, like me, sought to superficially participate in world events removed from their immediate reality because it was easy and convenient and well-intentioned to do so. I only question what this may entail, and how our mourning — for our loved ones, for our communities, for humanity — is changing in this restless digital era, how we negotiate between our real and virtual realities.
Tamar Ziff is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at t.ziff@cavalierdaily.com.
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