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 4 of 4)

reason: You’ve written that the popular mythology about civic behavior during a crisis—that people are “hysterical, prone to error, and even dangerous”—now “pervades current disaster management policy and technological orientations.” You mentioned one example earlier, the reluctance to release information. What else did you have in mind?

Sutton: One of the reasons there is such a lack of attention to social media across the board—at city level, state level, federal level—is that governments restrict access. Their employees, in general, don’t have access outside of their intranet. So they can’t get streamingvideo, they can’t get on social networking sites, they can’t get onto the Internet in general, they can’t read or post to blogs. The first step is just lifting the restrictions so they have access.

After that, they’re trying to figure out how to use these technologies. But it’s a Pandora’s box. There are so many levels of policy that have to be addressed. We haven’t even got into the issues of privacy. This raises a lot of questions about Big Brother and surveillance. The government can now look in on citizen communications in ways it couldn’t before. Law enforcement gets into Facebook and MySpace groups. The way Twitter is designed, anybody can see what you’re saying to somebody else. If citizens are using these technologies with the idea that their communications might be in some ways private, they are misinformed.

It might affect the way they communicate with one another as well. People might choose to use a pseudonym so information can’t be tracked back to them.

reason: There are advantages to having an open system that anyone can read during, for example, the wildfires. And I can imagine times when it might be advantageous to have an anonymous channel as well, in case somebody has important information but doesn’t want to implicate himself in something. So people should understand whether a system is private, and the government should respect the privacy of an anonymous system. Is the legal issue more complicated than that?

Sutton: It may not be too much more complicated than that. It may be more about the perception of whether people have privacy. It raises questions.

I guess that’s my biggest point. There are so many policy issues that have not been addressed. The law moves so slowly, and technology moves so fast.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker ([e-mail]) is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press). 

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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