Boxing Day Tsunami

                                  As I lie on the beach, I feel the heat radiating off me

                                  and I get a feeling of satisfaction with knowing how

                                  cold it is, being the middle of winter, at home.

                                 I lie up to notice the incredible low tide, it is like nothing
                                 I have seen before. I see my father walking where the
                                 sea was once floating. I join him, but within a few seconds
                                 we realise something is not right and we begin to run back
                                 to the resort.

                                  A wall of water begins to gather speed as it drives

                                  towards land, a tsunami.

   The tsunami hits and the water is everywhere,

      deep and thick with mud. People, cars, houses,

           shops all being washed away with the sea of water.

                                 It is hard to believe the land was a float with water only
                                 moments earlier, but the destruction and heartache is
                                 a constant reminder.

                                 The tribute to the many innocent lives lost in the 2004
                                 Boxing Day Thailand tsunami.


Critical Reflection

Prosthetic memory enables people to inhibit a collective opportunity to experience a collective past that they were not a part of.

 I was not in Thailand during the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami; however the images seen in the mass media enabled me to draw upon vivid and seemingly lived experiences of the day. My prosthetic memory is enhanced by the cinematic experience of watching the movie Hereafter, 'prosthetic memories are adopted as the result of a person's experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history he or she did not live' (28). The combination of both the destruction and film poster images, as seen above, are a reminder of how the film enhanced the "realness" of the prosthetic memory, by enabling the audience to take on a more emotional and involved role in the event. As Blumer explains, '...the experience of the film might be as formative and powerful as other life experiences. What people see might affect them so significantly that the images would actually become a part of their own archive of experience' (as cited in Landsberg 30).The images above show how the mediated experience has become malleable, it has moved from its original form and become a subjective memory.

 Mediated memories can be much clearer than some personal memories, because the images are replayed over and over in the media and people watch the same images repeatedly, unlike a personal memory that is only lived through once. The repetition of images help in not letting people forget too easily about disastrous events, Landsberg claims that, 'technologies of mass culture are a preeminent site for the production of empathy' (47). Hence, the mediated memory enables others to have greater empathy for those people who lost their lives, or who were left with the aftermath of destruction, by allowing others to create their own prosthetic memory of the day. The memorial in the last image above is a reminder that although this is a prosthetic memory, it is a real event and many innocent people lost their lives on that day. Prosthetic memory enables people from all around the world who were unaffected by the tsunami to have greater compassion for those who were there, by creating scenarios which people can personally relate to.

Prosthetic memory can enable people to inhibit a collective opportunity to experience a collective past that they were not a part of. Landsberg suggests that experiential media can 'provide people with the collective opportunity of having an experiential relationship to a collective or cultural past they did not experience' (33). However, a collective memory differs from that of a prosthetic memory, because collective memory is based on living memory, as Halbwachs explains collective memory, '... retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive" (143). 

Therefore, prosthetic memory does allow one to experience a past event, such as the Boxing Day Tsunami, through the collective opportunity of the media, but it differs from a collective memory because it is not a real, living memory.

Bibliography

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.  Print. 

Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory Reader: The Collective Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

Hereafter. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros, 2010. DVD.