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Abstract

This article explores how collective memory of the 1999 Marmara earthquake frames collective thinking of “the expected Istanbul earthquake” through numerous catastrophic earthquake scenarios posted on the prominent Turkish social media platform called Ekşi Sözlük for nearly two decades. The article first integrates memory, media, and disaster studies to theorize how a looming catastrophe is (re)imagined in retrospect. It then analyzes earthquake scenarios using representative samples to illustrate how the oscillatory dynamics and acts of disaster memory shape the future thinking of a not-yet-come threat within a Turkish social media ecology.

Keywords

collective memory collective future thinking earthquake Ekşi Sözlük Turkey

Introduction

On August 17, 1999, at 03:02 (local time), an earthquake (called the Marmara earthquake, the August 17 or 1999 earthquake) struck an area of 41,000 km² in the Marmara Region, which is the second smallest but the most densely populated region in Turkey, with a magnitude of 7.4 (Mw) for 45 seconds. With weaknesses in crisis management and the inadequacy of search and rescue technologies, this devastating natural hazard immediately escalated into a disaster, resulting in 18,373 fatalities, 48,901 injuries, 505 disabled individuals, and 96,796 unusable buildings according to official authorities (Grand National Assembly of Turkey, 2010). Due to its vivid and emotionally charged recollections, the Marmara earthquake rapidly became a flashbulb disaster memory (Er, 2003). Its impact also extended beyond the immediate aftermath, resulting in chronic psychological disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder, and depression (Basoglu, 2002; Iskit et al., 2001; Karanci and Acarturk, 2005). The trauma of the earthquake has even been observed to transmit intergenerationally (Canel and Balcı, 2018). The earthquake acquired a mediatized memory status with the Turkish mainstream media (Tekeli-Yeşil et al., 2018). In recent research, the Marmara earthquake ranked as the second most frequently recalled event in 2017 (Tekcan et al., 2017) and the third most remembered event in 2018 and 2020 among the Turkish population (Öner and Gülgöz, 2020).

Interestingly, the Marmara earthquake has started to influence Turkish collective future thinking in its aftermath. This shift comes after thorough post-earthquake research that unveiled notable tectonic plate movements, heightened seismic tension, and ruptures in adjacent segments of the North Anatolian Fault. These findings have raised significant scientific concerns about the high probability of another major earthquake in the same region. By conducting primary research on the effects of the Marmara earthquake on future seismic hazards and events, Parsons et al. (2000) found “a 62 ± 15% probability of strong shaking during the next 30 years and 32 ± 12% during the next decade.” Later, Parsons (2004) recalculated the probability of the expected earthquake as “the moment magnitude >7 earthquake in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul has a 35–70% likelihood of occurring in the next 30 years.” Subsequent research also has repeatedly confirmed that an earthquake with a magnitude of approximately 7.5 is likely to occur in the Marmara Region including Istanbul (Bohnhoff et al., 2016; Erdik, 2013; Erdik et al., 2003; Kayaalp and Arslan, 2022; Şengör et al., 2005). While the exact date, location, and magnitude of the predicted earthquake cannot be determined, scientific consensus suggests that it is likely to occur in the near future and result in at least 30,000 fatalities, as well as the collapse of over 50,000 buildings (Kayaalp and Arslan, 2022).

Shortly after this relationship was uncovered, the disaster memory of the Marmara earthquake and the catastrophic future thinking of the expected Istanbul earthquake began to intertwine in various narrative posts shared by users on Ekşi Sözlük. Founded on February 15, 1999, with the slogan “the sacred source of knowledge,” Ekşi Sözlük has played a pivotal role in the development of digital culture in Turkey and has become one of the most widely visited websites globally. According to statistics shared at the end of 2022 on the platform, Ekşi Sözlük was accessed by over 363 million unique individuals, resulting in more than 8.1 billion page views. Out of the total worldwide visitors, 92.21% were from Turkey, and within that group, Istanbul accounted for 31.79% of the visitors accessing the platform. With a virtual community consisting of nearly 400,000 registered users, Ekşi Sözlük can influence public discourse and attract significant attention with its critical stance, especially during moments of crisis in Turkey. It therefore has frequently faced access restrictions imposed by legal authorities through different bans for various reasons, including in 2023.

On Ekşi Sözlük, users can share any kind of information, knowledge, opinions, experiences, observations, and comments on almost every concept, subject, person, or event in a continuous, collaborative, and collective manner. Kapanoglu (2012: 31), the founder of the platform, describes its features as follows: Unlike mainstream media, you obtain real-time information from Ekşi Sözlük. In contrast to social media platforms, you also have the chance to gather opinions on a particular topic in an organized manner under specific headings. Even when an earthquake occurs somewhere, you instantly become aware of it. This claim has indeed been confirmed by a recent study, which reveals a correlation between earthquake-related entries on Ekşi Sözlük and the predicted intensities of earthquakes in Turkey. The study concludes that Ekşi Sözlük has the potential to be a reliable source of macroseismic intensity data for earthquakes in Turkey (Ertuncay et al., 2021). In addition to its diverse and extensive content on the earthquakes in Turkey, Ekşi Sözlük particularly provides a rich corpus of posts about Marmara earthquake on the topic page titled “17 Ağustos 1999” [17 August 1999]¹ which currently has 2842 entries [as of July 10, 2023]. This page opens with an entry posted on May 25, 2000, which reads “the day that will forever be remembered with sorrow by all of Turkey.” Since then, Ekşi Sözlük’s users have consistently shared their feelings, experiences, traumas, and memories of the Marmara earthquake for over two decades.

Furthermore, Ekşi Sözlük serves as a platform not only for preserving memories related to the Marmara earthquake but also for collective future thinking about the expected Istanbul earthquake. The topic page titled “beklenen büyük İstanbul depremi” [the expected major Istanbul earthquake]² activated on 28.02.2000 and currently holding around 8000 posts [as of July 10, 2023], mostly consists of future scenarios about this looming threat posted by thousands of Ekşi Sözlük users. These catastrophic scenarios offer an invaluable corpus for analyzing the cultural, collective, and collaborative manifestations of prospective memory, which is theorized with the phrase of “remembering the past to imagine the future” (Schacter and Addis, 2007b) and under concepts such as “episodic future thought” (Szpunar and McDermott, 2009) and “collective future thinking” (Szpunar and Szpunar, 2016), or “retrospective future thinking” (Roderer and Bohn, 2023; Roderer et al., 2022). Taking an interdisciplinary approach to collective memory, digital media, and natural disaster in this article, I aim to explore how the past and future(s) are reciprocally remembered and imagined within a social media ecology through scenarios that offer vivid and affective descriptions of potential outcomes if and/or when expected Istanbul earthquake occurs. Before delving into an analysis of the corpus of earthquake scenarios with various representative samples, I attempt to construct a theoretical standpoint for exploring the case at hand thoroughly by unraveling and reweaving the connective threads between memory, media, and disaster in the following section.

Theory: Imagining a looming catastrophe in retrospect on social media

Drawing upon experimental and empirical methods, Bartlett ([1932] 1995: 213) was the first not only to redefine remembering as “imaginative reconstruction or construction” rather than an exact reproduction of the past but also to bring “remembering into line with imagining, an expression of the same activities.” The constructive memory approach has been further developed with the discoveries that amnesic patients also exhibit difficulties in visualizing or planning even simple simulations for the future (Tulving, 1985), and that the brain’s prefrontal cortex is not only responsible for remembering but also manages mental processes, including predicting, foresight, and forecasting future events (Ingvar, 1985). Moreover, based on the evidence that remembering the past and imagining the future depends on the same neural mechanism, Schacter and Addis (2007a) argue that “we project ourselves into the future based on what we remember from the past.” In support of this hypothesis, patients with hippocampal damage have been found to have difficulty imagining new experiences, highlighting the strong similarities between remembering and imagining (Hassabis et al., 2007). The intricate relationship between remembering and imagining is once again highlighted by the concept of the “remembering–imagining system” (Conway et al., 2016), which underscores the critical role of remembering in episodic future thinking and imagining in integrating past, present, and future goal-related activities. Ultimately, by introducing the concept of “retrospective future thinking,” Roderer et al (2022; Roderer and Bohn, 2023) unveil a novel form and method of future thinking framed by (implicit) memory.

On the other hand, the “futurity” of collective memory, which is substantially constructed based on analogies and metaphors of individual memory (Anastasio et al., 2012), began to be explored in the 1970s. Luhmann (1976) introduces the idea of the ‘present future” as images derived from complex present expectations and past experiences. In response, Koselleck ([1979] 2004) proposes the notion of “future pasts,” which suggests that the lived present is a “former future” as it once was a realization of a potential future anticipated or imagined in the past. Similarly, while Lowenthal ([1985] 2015) connects the remembered past to habits and recognitions that are essential to present functions and future anticipations, Assmann ([1992] 2011: 28) explicitly suggests that “collective memory not only reconstructs the past but also organizes the experience of the present and the future.” Huyssen (2003) further explains how the future has folded itself back into the past with the modern structure of temporality and showed how the past plays a role in imagining the future with the various manifestations of the “future of memory.” Overall, collective memory connects communities not only to their past but also to their future, and thus shapes the way they collectively think about the future (Schacter and Welker, 2016).

Furthermore, with the seminal concept of “collective future thought” defined as “the act of imagining an event that has yet to transpire on behalf of, or by, a group,” Szpunar and Szpunar (2016: 378) opens a foundation for discussions on how individuals within groups, as well as the groups as a whole, imagine their own futures. In response, Michaelian and Sutton (2019) make a significant contribution to this topic with the notion of “collective mental time travel,” which encompasses the act of remembering a past event or envisioning a future event collectively. However, Topcu and Hirst (2020) propose that when collective mental time travel is performed at a national scale, it should be regarded as a distinct category under the concept of “national mental time travel.” By emphasizing the reliance of collective memory on collective imagination, de Saint-Laurent (2018) also highlights how collective memory often provides a frame of reference for collective future thinking. Tabaszewska (2022) further explores how imaginations of the future integrate into the present experiences and shape collective memory in the Polish context.

At this juncture, another key question emerges: How do digital media ecologies frame the interplay between retrospective and prospective dynamics and acts of collective memory? By equating the history of memory with the history of media, Erll (2011) suggests that the dominant, influential, and widespread media technologies, forms, and products of each era play a primary role in shaping, reconfiguring, and representing memory. That is why, “as our lives have become increasingly digitized, digital memories become us” (Garde-Hansen et al., 2009: 1). The past thus began to be reconstructed and remembered through digital media discourses, forms, technologies, and practices’ (Garde-Hansen, 2011). Nevertheless, the digital-global (globital) memory work (Reading and Notley, 2018), performed at the intersections of 21st-century communication and media technologies and ecologies, still relies on energetic labor encompassing thinking, acting, recalling, responding, and sharing. Globital memory work accordingly necessitates complex sociotechnical systems, including intricate machinery, corporate entities, policies, institutions, hardware, software, and algorithms, which facilitate the creation, recording, and distribution of memories across time and space (Reading and Notley 2018). In particular, the Web – a digital and global network of interconnected and hypertextual contents, not only serves as a resource for (collective) memory-making (Pentzold and Sommer, 2011) but also functions as a sociotechnical ecosystem for performing globital memory work, accumulating memory labor, generating memory capital, and converting it into other forms of capital (Reading, 2021). More specifically, social networking, facilitated by Web 2.0-based interactive, collaborative, and user-generated technologies, is one of the most efficient mediums for producing, transmitting, and consuming memories in our era. Social media ultimately emerge as a relevant platform for articulating, sharing, circulating, and disseminating alternative and non-official representations of the past and thus challenging, changing, and shaping the collective memory of groups (Zhao and Liu, 2015).

Digital ecosystems, the Web, and social media have also fundamentally transformed the way groups engage in future thinking. Collective future thinking online both differ from and share similarities with collective future thinking offline. The fundamental cognitive and social operations and processes underlying collective future thinking remain consistent regardless of the medium and context. For instance, the impact of major events can have a lasting influence on collective future thinking, irrespective of the medium through which they are shared and discussed. In offline settings, collective future thinking often occurs within local communities, organizations, or through face-to-face interactions and relies on traditional communication channels and physical gatherings. Conversely, digital media’s unique features such as virtual presence, anonymity, accessibility, speed, and reach of communication, allow for a larger and more geographically dispersed community, enabling a wider range of experiences, opinions, and cultural backgrounds to shape the construction of future thought. Especially, the participatory nature of online communities allows for collaborative sense-making, where individuals engage in dialogues, discussions, and collective sense-making processes that contribute to the formation of collective future thinking. The cumulative effect of such interactions can contribute to the overall tone and direction of the collective future thinking within online communities. The speed and reach of online communication enable the rapid dissemination and exchange of ideas, fostering the co-construction of future scenarios and the potential for collective action.

The last point to be addressed in this section is how the phenomena and studies of disaster, memory, and media symbiotically interact, influence, and construct each other. While it may seem that the relationship between memory and disaster studies has been recently overlooked, an implicit connection between the two fields can even be traced back to Durkheim’s ([1912] 2008) concept of “piacular rites,” which essentially refers to solemn, mournful, and commemorative ceremonies related to misfortune, evil omens, or anything that causes feelings of sorrow or fear. For the sake of brevity, merely considering the impact of the Holocaust on the flourishing of memory studies (see Rothberg, 2009) immediately highlights the undeniable and intricate interplay between both fields. In this sense, memory studies mostly involves the research of collective and cultural representations of disasters with their factualities, transmission, inter-generationalities, trans-culturalities as well as reimaginations, traumas, and affects.

Although disaster studies have shown interest in social memory over the past few decades, a significant portion of this interest has focused on the recollection and representation of “past” disasters (Madsen and O’Mullan, 2013). In contrast, this research focuses on imaginations and projections of a future catastrophe by providing a perspective on how acts of remembering disasters from the lived past explicitly and implicitly shape the imagination of a future disaster in the present. Particularly, exploring earthquake memories aligns with disaster (memory) studies, as conceptualizations of disaster in modern times were mostly shaped after the Lisbon earthquake, which was widely regarded as the “first modern disaster” (Dynes, 2005). Furthermore, defining ‘the disaster as event” that disrupts the standard flow of everyday life (Knowles and Loeb, 2021) also underscores its mnemonic functions and its relevance for memory studies. While the temporality of a disaster provides a framework for societies to create mnemonic narratives around the event and, thus, construct a collective memory of it, the affect of a disaster – profound emotional and psychological changes and challenges in victims’ lives, determines the scale of memorability.

When it comes to transform disastrous events into disaster memories, as Rigney (2021) suggests, such events must be translated into transmissible experiences through the use of available media and cultural forms that serve as memory carriers and meaningful information structures. Media, thus, frames the perception, transmission, and reception of a disaster by shaping how it is recognized, facilitating the transformation of experiences into representations, and allowing audiences to receive these cultural representations of disasters. Ultimately, the cultural representations of some disasters, which invariably result from the closely intertwined stages of perception, transmission, and reception, may become figures of collective memory (van Asperen and Jensen, 2023). However, not all disasters or aspects of a disaster are equally remembered; only certain elements of a disastrous past can become more deeply ingrained in collective memory than others. In Rigney’s (2016) terms, a disproportionate distribution of attention and resources toward some disasters makes them differentially memorable. That is partly why, as Blanchot (1995) aphoristically put it, the disaster is also associated with forgetfulness – forgetfulness without memory, or the act of remembering forgetfully. Overall, fittingly for its conceptualization as “being in the middle” in a broader sense, media occupy the center of the nexus of memory and disaster research, generating a triadic symbiosis of disaster, media, and memory studies.

Analysis: Exploring the oscillatory acts of disaster memory in the earthquake scenarios

In this research, I adopted a “digital ethnographic perspective” (Underberg and Zorn, 2013) and conducted a “thematic narrative analysis” (Riessman, 2007) on the scenarios extracted from the aforementioned topic page. In the selection of a representative sample of scenarios purposive sampling is used to deliberately choose information-rich cases with a high potential for thorough analysis (Patton, 2015). To identify common themes and patterns, I systematically reviewed approximately 8000 posts on the topic page in chronological order, starting from the first post to the last one [as of July 10, 2023]. Moreover, to identify and select relevant content from those posts for analysis, a coding scheme based on Horn’s (2018) definition of a scenario as “instruments for exploring possible futures” and “analytic explorations of possibilities,” which involve “more or less detailed descriptions of hypothetical sequences of events,” was implemented. The most representative scenarios, which occupy minimal space while containing the most information, were carefully identified and interpreted in this section.

Before moving forward, I suggest visualizing memory as a swinging pendulum to gain a deeper understanding of the analysis concerning the dual role and oscillatory acts of memory in producing the earthquake scenarios. Retrospective acts of memory, akin to the backward swing of a pendulum, represent delving into the reservoir of past experiences, knowledge, and information about the Marmara earthquake. Conversely, the pendulum’s descent to the other side symbolizes the start of memory’s prospective swing into the imagination of the future earthquake. When the pendulum reaches the apex of its forward swing, it again briefly pauses, indicating the end of memory’s prospective capacity to imagine possible futures related to the expected earthquake. This metaphor indeed aligns with findings discussed earlier on how memory constantly operates retrospectively and prospectively, swinging back and forth, navigating between the realms of the past and the future. The pendulum swings of memory can make it easier to explore how the past and the future, the individual and the collective, remembering and imagining, senses and emotions, lived and imagined experiences, past trauma, and future anxiety interact and manifest within the earthquake scenarios.

This perspective also explains how and why the scenarios primarily manifest various operations of the “mnemonic imagination” (Keightley and Pickering, 2012), which provides a framework for understanding why and how imagination and memory collaborate in a temporal continuum to pre-feel lived past or imagined future events. Through the repetition model of collective temporal thought, Yamashiro and Roediger (2019) also point out that people imagine the collective future as a continuation or repetition of “origin events” from collective memory. In this regard, the case at hand not only illustrates the interconnectedness of memory between the lived past and the imagined future but also highlights how collective future thinking benefits from drawing upon the collective memory as a frame of reference, providing historical analogies and generalizations (de Saint-Laurent, 2018). A user’s portrayal of the expected Istanbul earthquake as “a natural disaster that reminds itself every August 17th” or the following excerpt that exemplifies how theoretical insights shed light on the profound influence of the past on our imaginative construction of the future:

I am one of those who experienced the 1999 earthquake at its epicenter. We lost our sense of smell due to the stench of corpses, and all the food we ate had a uniform taste. The memory of chickpea grains, like stones in muddy rice, is still vivid in my mind. I am attempting to convey these sensations without exaggeration. The year was 2013 when I wrote a note in a corner of my notebook, thirteen years after the earthquake: “Within 30 years, there will be an earthquake in Marmara of at least the same magnitude as the one on August 17th.” I don’t know where that note is, but its contents constantly come to my mind, replaying the events of the 1999 earthquake like a film strip. We live our lives amidst the chaos of unplanned urbanization and reckless construction as if awaiting our fate like death row prisoners. Some of us prepare for weddings, while others have just entered the world and some present small gifts to loved ones with their first salary. Life continues its course, abruptly and unexpectedly turning everything upside down (@whyssrs, 06.10.2013: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/37447153).

Such samples not only demonstrate how different memories can help each other emerge through a multidirectional process of mutual illumination, highlighting both the similarities and differences between them (Rothberg, 2009), but also show how the past and collective memory are essential resources for imagining common futures (Assmann and Conrad, 2010). In other words, the strategy of “representing less familiar events through the lens of more familiar ones to extend existing schemes of knowledge to previously unarticulated experiences” is not only at work here but is also used to imagine future events and articulate pre-experiences (Rigney, 2021). Moreover, sensory memories also play a crucial role in conveying the vividness and intensity of the earthquake event and experience. The user’s description of the loss of their sense of smell due to corpses or food flavor in the post above both adds depth, emotional resonance, and realism to the narrative and highlights how sensory memories can be triggered by powerful and traumatic events.

Furthermore, the user’s mention of a note made 13 years ago about the future earthquake remains constantly present in the back of the user’s mind, or the recurring mental image of the Marmara earthquake, akin to a film strip, indicates that the memories of this disaster resurface spontaneously, rather than being consciously recalled. That is to say, using memories of the Marmara earthquake to build scenarios about the future earthquake is not necessarily a conscious and deliberate act of memory. Some projections of the expected Istanbul earthquake can also be regarded as the traces of “implicit collective memory” (Erll, 2022) as they are mostly (re)produced through the unintentional repurposing of memories of the Marmara earthquake without conscious awareness and a commemorative intention and function. Erll’s (2022) emphasis on the future-making capacities of implicit collective memory by revealing its pre-forming, forward-pushing, and forward-facing dynamics already explains why and how a form of collective memory can implicitly frame future thought. This claim makes more sense when considering that implicit collective memory is mostly performed through mediative acts, potentially on digital media (Erll, 2022). In a similar vein, the following excerpts demonstrate how the traumatic, mediatized, and flashbulb memories of the Marmara earthquake unfold and shape future simulations of the expected Istanbul earthquake in an implicit, remedial, and forward-pushing manner:

It [the expected earthquake] is one of the possibilities that scares me the most. It is one of the greatest signs that remind humanity of desperation. I never forget, I was collecting tobacco in the field at the dawn of the 17th of August earthquake. Radio 1 was on. The first number when the earthquake happened started with 25 people losing their lives and the number continued to increase. We went home at noon, I turned on the 37-inch black and white TV anxiously. We saw the aerial footage; it was like a nightmare. Rescuers screamed to see if anyone could hear my voice. The state of the earthquake survivors who were pulled alive from the rubble. That day never ended. Since that day, at the slightest earthquake, I lose my mind, I lose my consciousness. May God not let our nation experience such a disaster again. I hope that day never comes (@gunaha girip boy veren adam, 04.08.2020: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/111082730).

Quite relatedly, many scenarios are explicitly framed by cognitive schemes or patterns derived from popular media. The premeditative function of disaster and dystopian movies plays a significant role in the creation and transformation of these scenarios. The pendulum of memory is once again at work, but this time in promoting “secular apocalyptic thought” (Jones, 2022; Wojcik, 1997), which refers to visions of the world being destroyed by humans and natural cataclysms. Retrospective and prospective swings of memory enable users to delve into a reservoir of mediatized past to imagine “apocalyptic futures” (Doran and Girard, 2008). In this sense, the interplay between the Marmara earthquake and the expected Istanbul earthquake also stands out as a distinctive case of how memory explicitly and implicitly frames the imagination of a future threat and apocalyptic thought. The samples like below ones and the case as a whole both highlight the transformative power of (mediatized) memory in imagining apocalyptic futures and creating (post-)apocalyptic narratives and provide glimpses into facets of Turkish (post-)apocalyptic thought about the looming threat:

We will be alone for a while in the post-apocalyptic environment in the series or movies (@solak, 05.09.2014: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/45471521).

What happens next will be like scenes seen in post-apocalyptic movies: looting, murder, rape, and the fight for survival (@sortayms, 03.03.2016: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/58922667).

A spectrum of negative emotions, intense sensations, and affective simulations, evoked by the anticipation of the future earthquake, is also manifested in the scenarios. In Blochian (1995) terms, such scenarios are expressions of the “not-yet-conscious” oriented toward the real, diverse, and possibilities of the “not-yet-become.” Moreover, the culturally specific qualities of these expressions highlight that the future is not just a technical or neutral space, but a cultural reality shaped by imagination, anticipation, and aspiration (Appadurai, 2013). In a sense, these scenarios can be regarded as cultural manifestations of the self-renewing potential of the future reality of the threat (Massumi, 2015). Furthermore, the horizon of present futurity (Luhmann, 1976), the superlative futurity of the un-actualized threat (Massumi, 2015) and “the infiniteness of the threat” (Blanchot, 1995) together can create affective experiences of a future (threat) into present reality. The rich and repetitive depictions of emotions and sensations related to the looming catastrophe in the following sample exemplify an affective experience of a future threat in the (past) present:

Imagine if you didn’t die in the earthquake. You find yourself buried under tons of concrete. . .You are stuck in a dark corner, and you wait for days without knowing what the end will be. . . No water. . . No food. . . All kinds of insects are wandering around on your right and left, and you can’t raise your hand and hit them. . . Rats. . . Darkness. . . Odors of corpses. . . Hunger. . . Thirst. . . Insects. . . Rats. . . Dark. . . Darkness. . . Perhaps there will be a corpse right next to you. Gradually decaying. . . Dark. . . Thirst. . . Lack of oxygen. . . In fact, you have no chance of being saved. . . Imagine that you don’t live on the top floor or a top floor or two of the top floors. It is unknown that it will happen. Maybe someone started to remove the concrete on you. It’s very unlikely to be lifted properly, not tipped over while being lifted. . . Dark. . . Thirst. . . Hunger. . . Rats. . . Insects. . . Corpse smell. . . Frankly, I wonder what more they can do to me in the hell I’m going to after. Darkness. . . A narrow coffin. . . Thirst. . . Hunger. . . Insects. . . And perhaps worst of all, a vague hope. . . I can’t imagine a more formidable hell. . .¹⁰ (@elseif, 19.04.2010: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/18811693).

Such scenarios also indicate that the pendulum of (disaster) memory causes earthquake survivors to oscillate between “re-experiencing” the past and “pre-experiencing” as well as vividly “previewing” and “prefeeling” the future catastrophe (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007). In this regard, the earthquake scenarios can be seen as socio-linguistic actualizations of “affective forecast” (Wilson and Gilbert, 2005), which refers to verbal and communicative expression and objectification of the prediction of future emotions. This also supports Blanchot’s (1995) claim that the writing of a disaster serves not only as a representation of the disaster but also as an experience of “the thought of the disaster.” In his own words, through the writing of disaster, it is not only the authors who will speak; let the disaster speak within them, even if it does so through their forgetfulness or silence (Blanchot, 1995: 4). The narrativization of a lived or anticipated disaster, whether in offline or online contexts, involves both translating raw, silenced, or entangled episodic memories into structured representations and reconstructing, communicating, socializing, and transmitting these memories. Considering such scenarios as inter-disaster fiction, which refers to narratives invented between the disaster that has occurred and the disaster that might occur (Saint-Amour, 2015), enables us to consider them not only as post-traumatic expressions of the Marmara earthquake but also as pre-traumatic expressions of the expected Istanbul earthquake.

Another category of the scenarios in question demonstrates an interplay between memory and prophecy. Interested in the functions of prophecy and its afterlives in temporality, historicity, and narrative form, Wenzel (2009) suggests that memory is implicitly about futurity and investigates this notion in detail by revealing the crucial role of prophecy in memory acts and processes:

I am not pretending that there will be an earthquake. I feel so strange right now that I thought of it on the evening of August 16, 1999. Such a disease is not a disease, not a headache, there was a very strange feeling that evening. I have not felt anything like that again in 11 years. I repeat I am not saying that there will be an earthquake, don’t be ridiculous, I thought that evening, then the idea that there will be an earthquake in Istanbul one day, then I found myself on this topic. Calm down, I am not from the future or anything (@rocknroll 2, 10.01.2011: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/21577681).

These scenarios are inherently tangible expressions of “past futures” – visions of the future imagined in the past (Wenzel, 2009), because they were generated at a specific moment in the past and contain visions of how potential futures unfold in relation to the expected Istanbul earthquake. The scenarios predicting that the Istanbul earthquake would occur within the elapsed period represent an unrealized version of past futures, as seen in the former example posted in 2014. Conversely, scenarios predicting that it will happen on a specific future date or leaving room for interpretation represent a not-yet fully realized version of past futures, like the latter one posted in 2004:

It will take place on Friday, February 13, 2015, at 6 am with a magnitude of 6.6. (@muted 25.08.2014: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/45223253).

I think it will cause big fires in winter. It will be a terrible day when people will burn to death even if their house is not destroyed (@earthshrine, 20.05.2004: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/4240290).

Moreover, as a dramatic manifestation of “gazing looking back on the future as the past” (Horn, 2018: 4) or as memories of the future, meaning the “recollection of what individuals and groups expected in the past” (Jedlowski, 2013: 121), the following fictional conversation set in the future exemplifies the act of recollection or looking back upon the future as the past in the present:

Let’s imagine the years ahead, perhaps 30 years from now. Here’s a possible dialogue that could take place between two individuals reflecting on the past:

It’s heartbreaking to think about the devastation caused by the earthquake. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in a single night as buildings crumbled. . . So many families, so many innocent children.

If only the technology for predicting earthquakes had been advanced enough back, they could have evacuated the city in the worst-case scenario, and no one would have had to suffer.

True, the technology we have now didn’t exist back then. However, scientists have always been warning people about the potential for an earthquake.

Then why didn’t they take precautions? Was it because they believed in supernatural powers rather than relying on science? Did they think those supernatural powers would protect them from earthquakes? (@alacakarga, 23.11.2022: https://eksisozluk.com/entry/145472548).

The qualitative and quantitative transformations in earthquake scenarios, in response to two unprecedentedly powerful and consecutive seismic hazards that struck southern and central Turkey (known as the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes) as well as northern and western Syria with magnitudes of 7.8 (Mw) and 7.7 (Mw) on February 6–7, 2023, reveal the ongoing and dynamic nature of collective future thinking. Up until February 6–7, 2023, about 6000 posts were shared on the relevant topic page over 23 years. However, in just 5 months, from February 6 to July 1, 2023, nearly 2000 more posts were added to the page. Notably, there were only 18 posts shared on the relevant topic in the month prior to February 6, 2023. On February 6 (126 posts) and February 7 (131 posts) alone, there was a significant surge, with 257 posts. Even more strikingly, within a two-week period, the number skyrocketed to 1487 posts. These statistics undeniably highlight the direct influence of the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes on the future thinking of the Istanbul earthquake. The sharp increase in post activity and engagement indicates heightened concern and a powerful desire to share information, experiences, and thoughts related to the topic.

Furthermore, witnessing the immediate aftermath and the widespread destruction captured through photos and videos shared online or on television about these earthquakes, users experienced a paradigm shift in their collective thinking. Individual eyewitness accounts and real-time updates about the earthquakes dominated the topic page, reflecting the urgency and shock caused by the disaster. The future thoughts and scenarios thus became more informed by real-life experiences and the tangible consequences of the disaster. As the following passage shows, mediated representations of the Kahramanmaras earthquakes unfold in traditional and new media, immediately becoming a reference point for understanding and anticipating the potential impact of an earthquake in Istanbul:

We are watching what will happen to us very soon on television, literally. . . All Istanbul residents should watch closely. That day, whatever will happen to us, is being shown step by step, with every detail. No one should be surprised when that day comes. No one should wonder how we ended up like this. How did this building collapse? Why did my neighborhood collapse? Why is no one rescuing me? Is anyone hearing me? I wonder if the buildings of my other family members have also collapsed. Did my friends’, my partner’s, and my loved ones’ buildings collapse too? Look, this will happen to us too. We will feel at least this helpless and inadequate. We will wait in at least this much silence and darkness. Watch carefully. . . Don’t say, does this have to happen to us too? Because it will happen. If something is not done, at least this much will happen. . . (@empe, 08.02.2023: https://eksisozluk1923/entry/148780027).

Conclusion

This study broadly demonstrates the dual role and oscillations of disaster memory in framing collective future thinking about a looming catastrophe in a social media context. It thus highlights the intricate interplays between the past and the future, the individual and the collective, remembering and imagining, past trauma, and future anxiety. Memory serves as a valuable resource for imagining the future, while future thinking can trigger conscious or unconscious acts of recollection. In other words, memory and future thinking are intricately intertwined, with each referring back to the other. Social media plays a significant role in mediating the acts and processes of future thinking, facilitating the exchange of ideas, and shaping perceptions of reality. More particularly, the study shows that the expected Istanbul earthquake has a significant impact on the collective future thinking of Turkish society in digital media environments predominantly shaped by the collective memory of the Marmara earthquake. Ekşi Sözlük provides a platform for producing, storing, and circulating non-official, non-institutional, and alternative mnemonic and imaginative narratives that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Footnotes

Data availability statement

All data used and analyzed in the article are available on the topic page of the “expected major Istanbul earthquake” (beklenen büyük İstanbul depremi) on Ekşi Sözlük. Please note that all the material on this page is in Turkish. However, web page translation apps may be helpful for those who are interested in accessing the content in English.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

ORCID iD

Erol Gülüm

Notes

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Remembering a disastrous past to imagine catastrophic future(s) on social media: The expected Istanbul earthquake

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theory: Imagining a looming catastrophe in retrospect on social media

Analysis: Exploring the oscillatory acts of disaster memory in the earthquake scenarios

Conclusion

Footnotes

Data availability statement

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References