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

(Page 3 of 4)

reason: What was appearing there that people found so valuable?

Sutton: They had volunteers that were monitoring the radio frequencies and putting up information as it was becoming available—monitoring one back-channel communication and putting it up on another. Local residents who had chosen not to evacuate could put up information about what was going on. Following the fires, locals went out and took pictures of evacuation areas, street by street and house by house, and then posted them to the website so people could then see whether or not their homes had been destroyed or damaged. That was not something that public officials would generally do. It’s a different level of information that gets down into the local community.

reason: Do you see any lessons there for newspapers and other outlets dealing with the convulsions in the journalism industry?

Sutton: I think so. Tapping into the information that’s flowing online is going to become very valuable. So many more people have access to these channels for sharing information, and they may find themselves doing so on a routine basis.

reason: The impression I got is that people found them pretty reliable as well. How did people validate them as sources?

Sutton: It’s one source out of many. You can’t mortgage your house on it. It’s a lead, not the end-all of all leads. You have to confirm your sources.

This question about reliability and validity and trust can’t be ignored. I don’t think you just accept anything that comes across a forum. But when other people on the forum validate it and say, “Yes, I’ve seen that too,” that certainly lends credibility to what’s being read.

reason: In a different context—the shootings in 2007 at Virginia Tech—you wrote about the collective problem-solving that takes place online.

Sutton: That was an interesting study about this question of reliability. Once Virginia Tech said that 32 people had been killed, people on Facebook started gathering names and sharing them with each other and creating these lists: “We know that John and Sally and Sue and Peter have been killed.” They kept adding to that list until, by the time Virginia Tech had actually released the names of those that had been killed, all the names had been identified across all the lists that we looked at. And not one time did they incorrectly identify a name.

This idea that members of the local public are going to be sharing misinformation and doing it in a really disorganized way is really challenged when you look at situations like Virginia Tech. People were very careful, they always validated what they said, and if they didn’t back up the information, someone else online would say, “Where did you get your information from, and how can you confirm it?” The crowd is not always wrong.

reason: To what extent are these uses of new media extensions of familiar behavior during disasters, and to what extent do they mark a rupture with previous patterns?

Sutton: We have almost a century of research on how people behave in disasters, and it’s a consistent pattern. We’re just seeing it in a new space. People don’t really change the way that they act, but technology is facilitating new activities online.

We’ve always looked at this phenomenon of emergence: emergent activities, emergent groups, emergent networks to meet unmet needs. The classic example is the activity of search and rescue following a disaster. People often say that the first responders are the fire personnel that arrive on the scene and start to dig people out. That’s not true. The first responders are the local citizens who have no knowledge of how to effectively conduct a search and rescue and yet they dive into the rubble and start digging people out. That’s an emergent activity that we see over and over again.

It’s also an example of convergence. Convergence is wherepeople come to the scene and participate in some way, by digging people out or by coordinating or by blocking traffic or by requesting more resources or by sending information to the Office of Emergency Communications—any new activity that’s meeting an unmet need.

So now we’re seeing emergence and convergence online. If you look at what was happening on Twitter and on Facebook during the Fargo floods, people were using those media to organize one another, to share information about evacuation zones, to encourage people to come to places where they needed additional help sandbagging and building up the dikes. It became a second level of warnings and alerts and organizing people and drawing resources to the necessary sites.

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..
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