A tsunami of images

While the generosity and sentiments of individual citizens in ‘donor’ countries is both heart-warming and encouraging, the entire event has brought a few characteristics of contemporary existence to the fore. It has driven home the point that we live in increasingly mediated times where even a natural calamity becomes a media opportunity for corporations and states alike. For the first time in recent memory, Australia and Sweden may have lost somewhere around 5,000 citizens at once to a natural disaster. It emphasises that the globalised world is a small interdependent planet and the draw of warm or cool climate, preferably close to a beach, causes large-scale seasonal migrations of leisure-seeking peoples across continents on an unprecedented scale.

It has been fascinating to sit back and watch the media jamboree unravel. Each of the affected countries has reacted to, or tried to use the media to its advantage and often in detriment to it. The developed world has unabashedly retracted from its usual hard-lined and often tight-fisted position to a relatively munificent one under intense media glare and scrutiny. That the US contribution amounts to one and half days spending in Iraq is incidental and ironic at best. The exasperating impotence of the UN and its bureaucratically measured response reminds one of the Indian foreign office’s reactions to Musharraf’s spontaneous media breakfast in New Delhi a few years ago.

Having said that, the emergent mediated space may still become the productive ground for political reparation and negotiation between ruling regimes and insurgents in Aceh and Sri Lanka. The US proposal to dispatch 1,400 marines, ostensibly for relief, to Sri Lanka drew criticism from India betraying her geo-political aspirations and Australia’s humanitarian overtures to Indonesia and Thailand tell its own story. Bored with images and footage recovered from returning tourists and amateurs from Thailand, Maldives and Sri Lanka, the world media has shifted its gaze to Myanmar, hungry to disclose its sensational and dark secrets, riding on the back of a killer tsunami. Imagine the media and ‘aid’ frenzy that would be sparked off by a similar catastrophe in North Korea or Iran!

Frederic Jameson, the philosopher and social theorist, has observed that we live in an era centred on consumption, characterised by its spatial dispersion and lack of depth. Travel shows on television hawk flickering images of palm-lined beaches on turquoise water, ‘exotic’ cultures and prestige destinations by glossing over any semblance to authenticity. As tourist destinations like Phuket, Galle, the Maldives or Bali are created, national economies get hitched to the seasonal flows of tourist capital and touristy desire. Leaders like Shinawatra then rush to shut out the media, hide the devastation, put a ‘moratorium’ on the official death toll, order a ‘clean up’ and beg tourists to stay on in a bid to buoy the disaster afflicted national economy and image.

At the same time, the media has helped the world to come together in a moment of shared human crisis. Its images have put a human face to the tragedy, presenting the universality of human suffering and vulnerability over difference. Parents in Canada see and feel the pain and helplessness in the image of the wailing mother in Banda Aceh or Karaikal, transcending the hitherto projected statistical dimension. It has clearly struck a chord with ordinary citizens resulting in unprecedented fund collections for relief and one wonders what moth-balled presidents of the world’s largest economy can do to further fund raising for the tsunami cause. For once, the collateral damage is there for all to see, naked and uncensored by state or military.

Despite the misfortune that natural calamities like this wreak on society in general and on its lower strata in particular, it brings out the best and the worst in people. The selfless acts of generosity in far corners of the globe are marred by a spate of orphaned child abductions in the affected areas. Still, the entire affair has, however obliquely, alluded to a possible utopian scenario where people across the world can share the burden of a human crisis while simultaneously exposing the petty and opportunistic underside of state-driven geo-politics.

It is now for the world media to decide and consider which end of the stick they want to hold in this age of globalisation, communication and strategic coercion.

The writer is an architect-researcher, presently based in Melbourne