Social Media and Orientalism

You're scrolling through Instagram after "service trip season", and see ten photos of your Western friends candidly hugging brown children. The backgrounds of these photos consist of dilapidated houses with colorful paint chipping off of them. You swipe to see beautiful landscapes of mountains, exotic plants and animals, and waterfalls. So many waterfalls.

As privileged Westerners, we grow to understand "service trip countries" such as Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, and Argentina through the photos we see on social media. This process is incredibly problematic because the pictures and stories that our Western friends bring back from their service trips abroad rarely represent the complexity and authenticity of the places they've visited. Every country in the world has cities surrounded by more impoverished areas. Outside the gentrified hipster-heaven of the West Loop awaits miles of hungry kids, failing schools, and overworked parents. Americans pity the starving children in "developing countries", but harshly judge and criminalize those living in our own cities. There is poverty everywhere, so why do Westerners see themselves as superior when we are facing similar problems in our own country?

We learn Orientalism through our media platforms, but we perpetuate it by perceiving these countries through the lenses we've been taught. We look for poverty where we've learned to expect it. With an Orientalist mindset, it is completely possible to come home from a different country and entirely miss its complexity. Studying or volunteering abroad can be such an educational experience, but only if we rid ourselves of our Orientalist biases. I think that it's great that we're learning about Orientalism, but I also think it is important to analyze how we view parts of our own country by comparison.