Traumatic Spaces

Abstract

New forms of mass communication have made people witnesses of traumatic events they would have formerly only heard about or read about later once these events were over. People are somehow made to share the same terrified spaces so that, often against their own will, they seem to become silent witnesses of traumatic events they might have otherwise wanted to escape. Life has changed and experience has been transformed through new Internet and mobile technologies as time and space have been refigured so quickly and irrevocably. When confronted by 9/11, many people, especially in the USA but also more globally, felt that they had suddenly found themselves living in a different kind of world than the one they felt they had known. Often they were made speechless by these traumatic events, which have proved the power of global media to disrupt and unsettle collective and individual lives. Life seems to have changed so quickly that words which seemed to make sense one day appeared to have been made ludicrous the next — just days before 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had said at the Pentagon that costcutting was ‘a matter of life and death’.