Dark tourism and digital gift economies: some epistemological notes

This paper suggests that the study of dark tourism or thana-tourism tends to reproduce some old conceptual and ideological models of research. This becomes evident when we consider the absence of cyber-epistemologies of dark tourism online and their covert communication with govern mobility or governing the social through mobility. Of primary focus is here the management of humans through technologies facilitating the taming of death. Our engagement with literatures of thanatology and dark tourism as a type of tourism promoting consumerism highlights that (a) dark tourism has been limited to traditional terrestrial fieldwork of the tourist as a consumer and tourism as a marketing process connected to experiential authenticity, and (b) as a result, researchers fall back to moralized approaches to it as territorially-bound heritage. This conceptual schema connects to the old Western European split between technology and memory. Alternatively, unconditional support of digital technics tends to glorify labour to merely attack the spirit of postmodern consumerism. We note that setting the “gift” of technology and its technicians against the “gift” of dark heritage does not encourage rigorous epistemological analysis of the status and transformations of dark tourism in the cyber space because it does not take on board the historical dimensions of digital govern mobilities. Instead of condemning technological means as instrumental and therefore inessential to contemporary social analysis, we have to (a) redefine the digital gift of dark tourism as temporary extension of life and (b) engage with Internet methodologies of digital dark tourism as an emerging theme in tourism analysis.