How social media posts overshadowed the Pahalgam tragedy

I remember that trip well, the line of houseboats on Dal Lake, a thrilling cable car ride in Gulmarg, the pine trees and green meadows of Pahalgam. I don’t remember if Baisaran, the site of the recent deadly terrorist attack, was on the itinerary. Perhaps it had not been developed as a destination then. For some reason no photographs have survived in the family albums.

Perhaps it’s just as well.

Otherwise, I might well have been one of the thousands who rushed to share their Pahalgam pictures as soon as the news of the Baisaran horror hit the news cycle. Everyone was clearly well-intentioned. It was a way to express solidarity and shock, to tell the world how heartbroken they felt that a place of such beauty had become a scene of such bloodshed. It was a tribute to a beautiful place scarred by tragedy. Perhaps not quite “Je Suis Kashmiri" but certainly “Je Suis Tourist in Kashmir".

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But as the pictures started filling social media, a sense of disquiet started welling up as well.

The happy smiling pictures at some point started to overshadow the very tragedy they were trying to highlight. Columnist Shobhaa De tried to express the discomfort in a social media post that was then shared by multiple outlets. “Now is not the time to post about your Kashmir trip. It’s not cute, it’s not content. It’s just tone-deaf. Stop being so insensitive for the sake of engagement. Read the goddamn room … Your Kashmir reels and posts can wait. People are going through real fear and loss." She went on to add, “Instagram isn’t the issue. It’s the disconnect."

That disconnect is hard to articulate. When terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in 2001, I remember looking at my old pictures with the iconic Manhattan landmarks. They looked so solid, so permanent. It was hard to believe that they had gone up in flames and crumbled. Those pictures filled me with such a sense of poignancy about a world that I feared was changed forever. But that was a world before social media.

The problem is we are now trained to think that social media’s main objective is to make others feel envious of our lives. We share pictures of exquisite home-cooked dinners so that friends and strangers can salivate over meals to which we did not invite them. We post pictures of ourselves laughing and drinking and having a gala time with our friends, knowing our bored followers, sitting at home, are scrolling through our feed. We subtly let people know how we have been invited to the opening of the city’s hottest new cocktail bar. When we go on vacation, we put up pictures of ourselves drinking coffee in the morning looking at the snow-capped mountain range outside the window. When I saw a tiger in a national park I couldn’t wait to come back to the lodge (and Wi-Fi) and post it so my friends could have tiger-envy. And of course, we always take a selfie while flying business class. Social media has basically become a smug machine to induce FOMO.

That is why it’s hard to look at everyone’s idyllic Kashmir holiday pictures right now and not feel a bit queasy. De hit the nail on the head when she used the words “content" and “engagement". Engagement is the name of the game here, and even those trying to be sensitive can no longer easily wiggle out of that trap. Social media influencers who never post anything beyond “hidden gem" restaurants and workout routines felt the immediate need to weigh in on Pahalgam. Their emotion might have well been genuine but their Kashmir holiday now becomes content just like the other post about the new cafe they went to the day before. We have well and truly absorbed the Meta message that everything is content that needs to go viral.

Of course there is a larger question about the transformative power of photography itself that lurks behind all this. In her book On Photography, writer and critic Susan Sontag argued that photography fosters a voyeuristic relationship with the world. While it purports to capture what is real, it also makes it less real. It literally flattens everything out into events worth capturing in a frame. In 1977, Sontag was already arguing that “just about everything had been photographed" and we were suffering from a glut of imagery.

Sontag died in 2004, long before the age of smartphones. At that time photography was still more a part of travel than daily life. Sontag summarised the tourist experience as “stop, take a photograph and move on." In its early days, Kodak’s slogan was a “a vacation without a Kodak is a vacation wasted." The snapshot was our way to remember, to tell ourselves (and the world) “I was there." In 2010, Kodak, in keeping with the times, said, “The real Kodak moment happens when you share." Now we live in an age where we wonder if we do not share the image, is it worth remembering it at all?

But Sontag argues, “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by converting experience into an image, a souvenir." The act of photography pretends it offers “instant access" to the real but is actually “another way of creating distance." Sontag’s main disquiet was with a photographer taking pictures of an unfolding event, images that we consume in a magazine or newspaper later and feel an imaginary connection to that event.

The Kashmir case is different. Our Pahalgam holiday pictures are far removed from the Baisaran reality. When I dig out that “souvenir" from holidays past and use it in a completely different context, that distance that Sontag talked about is more than doubled. I was not there in Baisaran when the terror unfolded. But somehow my happy family vacation picture inveigles its way into the story. The point feels no longer really about the carnage in Pahalgam. The point, as is usual with social media in a world where so many images are constantly jostling for our eyeballs, becomes “look at me."

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Sontag feared we were becoming “tourists of reality." In these Pahalgam pictures, the tourist becomes the reality.

If the avalanche of photographs was disquieting, there was more cringe in store. Keeping pace with the Pahalgam holiday pictures, was an AI-generated image of a woman sitting on the ground in a pool of blood next to her slain husband.

When the Ghibli AI trend initially started, many artist friends expressed their qualms about AI art in general. Others pointed out that people were rushing to feed their images to the machine, giving AI more data to mine. But in a world filled with despair and meanness, there was something heartwarming about the cute big-eyed Ghibli-fied versions of ourselves. They were our nicer avatars.

But it felt utterly baffling that someone thought it made sense to make a Ghibli-fied version of a grieving wife and her murdered husband. Yet thousands of people, including some artists, found it moving and shared it. If Sontag worried about how the photograph inadvertently created distance from the actual experience, what would she make of this AI-generated Ghibli version of reality, an image that is algorithmically engineered to tug at heartstrings?

The surrealist artist Man Ray supposedly said, “I photograph what I do not wish to paint, and I paint what I cannot photograph." Now we have turned to AI to transform our photographs of tragedy into painting. We use our old holiday pictures to bear witness to new tragedy as if we are somehow capturing a piece of history through our memories. But the relationship between history and memory has always been tricky.

As the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali reminded us long ago, “My memory is again in the way of your history." And if it refuses to get out of the way, now there’s always AI.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.

Also read: How Pahalgam terror attack grounded Kashmir’s rising tourism tide - ‘they did not just kill people’