Tweeting Under Fire

Disaster researcher Jeannette Sutton explores how ordinary people create their own media during crises.

Jesse Walker from the August/September 2009 issue

When wildfires swept through Southern California in October and November 2007, everyone with a home near the fire line was desperate for information. But the traditional means of finding time-sensitive news were flawed.

After the crisis, when a trio of disaster researchers asked residents how they felt about mainstream news coverage, the investigators heard complaints that “the information was insufficient, either because it lacked specificity to their area; was biased towards metropolitan areas; seemed focused on the sensational at the expense of those in rural or outlying areas; or was simply inaccurate.” And the government? Sometimes it did a good job of getting breaking news to the public, but other times its outlets were “slow to update information to at-risk and evacuated communities or simply overwhelmed and stymied by on-line traffic.”

Fortunately, there were alternatives. As one interviewee told the researchers, “the only way we all have to get good information here is for those who have it to share it. We relied on others to give us updates when they had info and we do the same for others.” That meant going online, to community forums such as RimOfTheWorld.net and SoCalMountains.com: quick, constantly updated efforts fueled by voluntary, amateur action. Earlier fires, another resident explained, had taught the locals that “there is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ won’t tell us if there is danger, ‘they’ aren’t coming to help, and ‘they’ won’t correct bad information. We have to do that amongst ourselves.” 

These do-it-yourselfers were enormously successful. By the end of the crisis, professional reporters and professional emergency workers alike were relying on RimOfTheWorld.net for the most up-to-date information. It was a bracing lesson not just for anyone who assumes that ordinary people are helpless in the face of disaster but for anyone who doubts that DIY media can ever outperform the mainstream press. 

The lead author of the disaster researchers’ paper is Jeannette Sutton, 38, a sociologist at the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center. Sutton is no stranger to catastrophe. Not long after graduating from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996, she worked with trauma patients as a hospital chaplain. After helping coordinate victim response efforts to the shootings at Columbine High School, it was a natural progression for her to work “in a much larger context but with a similar population: people who were affected by events that disrupted their lives.” Sutton went on to earn her doctorate in sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she became part of a small, interdisciplinary group of scholars investigating the ways ordinary people use new media during crises. The tools in question range from Facebook to Flickr to Twitter to blogs—any technology that allows people to communicate and collaborate.

“Social media support social networking,” Sutton says. “It’s open. Lots of people can participate. Wisdom is driven up from the bottom. It’s not experts saying this is what it is, it’s people collaborating at a grassroots level.”

Managing Editor Jesse Walker spoke with Sutton via phone in May.

reason: One of your papers contrasts “front channel” and “back channel” communications during a disaster. How do the two channels view each other?

Sutton: The front channel is the official communication from public officials. They tend to rely on the major media to push information out to the public. The back channel is the unofficial communication that’s going on behind the scenes between members of the public. Public officials tend to view back- channel communications with great skepticism. It’s not controlled, it’s perceived as being disorganized, and there’s the potential for misinformation.

Where people use social media to communicate with one another, they’re doing so partly because the information they’re seeing and hearing from public officials and mainstream media is not adequate for what they need. Information from public officials flows very slowly. There are procedures that officials go through: They create a press release, they check it, they double-check it, they triplecheck it, they send it up the chain of command—all these different people have to sign off. By the time that information is released, members of the public could have been sharing information at lightning speed through all of these back channels.

People who are using these social media channels have a perception of an information dearth. Policy restricts officials from being able to share information. And the public isn’t waiting for those press releases anymore.

That might be one of the reasons you’re seeing misinformation or what might be perceived as rumors flowing on these different communications channels too. It’s because people are trying to understand what’s happening.

reason: A lot of the recent commentary about new media and disasters has accused Twitter of fomenting hysteria about swine flu. 

Sutton: Yeah. (Sighs.) Somebody from the Canadian Press called and asked me about my perception of what’s happening online. I said people are saying there’s hysteria, and they quoted me as saying hysteria happens. But it’s not true!

In the initial days, when the swine flu first got going and Twitter was very, very active, I was online watching how many posts were coming across per second. And there were hundreds and hundreds of people Twittering from around the world on channels that were dedicated to the epidemic. People were using Twitter for sharing information, for confirming information, for asking questions about information, for organizing themselves, for asking questions about where resources are.

Comments

LarryA|7.17.09 @ 2:19PM|#

There's a longstanding myth that's perpetuated over and over again, in every disaster, about this concept of panic. It's one of the reasons that public officials hold back information: They have this fear that if they give out too much information, people are going to panic.

Yeah.

Panic is not an effective survival reaction. If people tended to panic whenever the situation went south, the human race would have died out long ago. But you can't sell that idea either in D.C. or in Hollywood.

With the government, a big part of the problem is the philosophy of, "We need to be in control, therefore we must micromanage. If it's Not Invented Here we don't want it."

I've been through several disasters over the past half-century. It was always ordinary people who stepped out of the chaos and started putting pieces back together.

There's also the first rule of public relations. No matter how bad the truth is, if you withhold it the rumors will be worse.

|7.17.09 @ 11:59PM|#

nice post..
___________________
Britney
Entertainment at one stop