Show some digital decorum

Cameras and tourists go hand in hand, but selfies outside memorials can be in poor taste.

It happened again. Idiot tourists decide a massacre site (this time an unfolding one) was the perfect spot to capture a memory. Last month a pair of tourists in Melbourne thought it a great idea to pose for shots just metres from where a car had deliberately ploughed into a crowd, killing six and injuring dozens. Not the scene that springs to mind when I think ‘‘Kodak moment’’.

This event simply adds to the long list of cringe-worthy photographs taken when maybe the phone or camera should have been stored away. Saucy snaps at Machu Picchu or Mount Kinabalu, smiling group selfies at Auschwitz or the 9/11 memorial in New York, Instagram posts from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin of happy tourists jumping between square sculptures – these are the must-do popular poses it would seem.

I’d say the travellers are devoid of any self-awareness and dripping in naivety, but the captions and hashtags of #sad #history #memorial suggest otherwise. Some digital decorum lessons are in order because it seems for plenty of other travellers this sort of disaster travel box-ticking and travellogging is the norm.

As the hyper-connected world stands, you’re forgiven for thinking that if you don’t grab at least a few tourist snaps it’s almost as if you never went. Pics or it didn’t happen, as the youths say. I will rest easy if I don’t see

REUTERS It goes without saying that you have to act appropriately when visiting historical sites like the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in Poland.