Feedback websites are an open form that allow people to post/ share their personal views on specific topics as well as begin discussions with other people on those topics. It includes blogs that allow people to interact by posting their own opinions and commenting on other people’s opinions, rather than reading concrete facts, as well as games that engage the user. This speaks to the saturation of the Holocaust in American culture; people can make jokes or gifs about topics, and play games as a form of learning about the event.
Holocaust Subreddit
Reddit is known as the front page of the internet. It’s a massive blog ran by users for users to interact with each other on various topics. Each topic is broken down into smaller groups called “subreddits”. The Holocaust has it’s own subreddit. It’s a bit small compared to the big subreddits such as “videos” or “news”. But it’s pretty active with over 1,750 subscribers. The page as a whole shows recent news posts about Holocaust related topics, many supporting revisionist theories. There is also some posts about the denying of Holocaust or relation to Holocaust Revisionism. I think majority of the topics are in the Revisionism department. There seems to mixed views for all remaining topics. But overall, many are just Revisionist supporting. This causes some implications as most posts have some facts that are manipulated or very biased towards one opinion or another.
Tumblr: History and the Holocaust
Tumblr is often seen as an amateur blog mostly consisted of shared pictures across blog to blog. However, even Tumblr has some Holocaust blogs made by it’s users. The strongest one that shows strong interactive requirements is the one done by a Holocaust remembrance group called “The Footsteps Team”. This team has a Youtube channel that contains videos with interviews, tours, and so on. Their Tumblr is organized more like a website, they have several tabs that lead to different topics of the Holocaust. In each tab there is links that relate to the tabs title. For example under the “The Camps” tab, there is a list of the bigger death camps, each camp has corresponding links to more information. All links all stay on their Tumblr page, which makes easy accessing to switch topics if needed. This website also has a tab to ask questions relating to the Holocaust. Overall, this website is easy accessing and gives choices to find brief to intermediate history of the Holcoaust.
Holocaust Remembrance
Though the popularity of Reddit, Tumblr, and other social media sites makes the topics such as the Holocaust more accessible to the public, the forums themselves do not often inspire educated reflections to events of the past.
The educational material publisher Glencoe and McGraw-Hill created a website that helped facilitate more educated reflections on the Holocaust. The site is primarily for educating young students in a very basic way about the Holocaust. However, it also seeks to engage the students in critical discussion of the Holocaust through simple journal activities.
The students respond to a question with their the help of their recently acquired knowledge and their opinions on what is means and how they can move forward with this knowledge. Journal entries, such as the example above, facilitate this kind of discussion but unfortunately do not allow it to be published to the site to start a dialogue. This is likely due to the young target age of this website and its use as a resource for teachers to present to students.