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Emergent Use of Social Media: A New Age of Opportunity for Disaster Resilience
Abstract
Social media are forms of information and communication technology disseminated through social interaction. Social media rely on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that are collaborative, decentralized, and community driven. They transform people from content consumers into content producers. Popular networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are versions of social media that are most commonly used for connecting with friends, relatives, and employees. The role of social media in disaster management became galvanized during the world response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. During the immediate aftermath, much of what people around the world were learning about the earthquake originated from social media sources. Social media became the new forum for collective intelligence, social convergence, and community activism. During the first 2 days following the earthquake, "texting" mobile phone users donated more than $5 million to the American Red Cross. Both public and private response agencies used Google Maps. Millions joined MySpace and Facebook discussion groups to share information, donate money, and offer comfort and support. Social media has also been described as "remarkably well organized, self correcting, accurate, and concentrated," calling into question the ingrained view of unidirectional, official-to-public information broadcasts. Social media may also offer potential psychological benefit for vulnerable populations gained through participation as stakeholders in the response. Disaster victims report a psychological need to contribute, and by doing so, they are better able to cope with their situation. Affected populations may gain resilience by replacing their helplessness with dignity, control, as well as personal and collective responsibility. However, widespread use of social media also involves several important challenges for disaster management. Although social media is growing rapidly, it remains less widespread and accessible than traditional media. Also, public officials often view P2P communications as "backchannels" with potential to spread misinformation and rumor. In addition, in absence of the normal checks and balances that regulate traditional media, privacy rights violations can occur as people use social media to describe personal events and circumstances.
... In the Covid 19 pandemic, social media has undoubtedly become one of the most important communication tools, as individuals are forced to abandon their daily routines. Indeed, while the functions of social media such as fundraising, informing, soothing and communicating can help people to overcome events in a healthier way (Keim and Noji 2011), they may negatively affect psychological resilience due to providing false information or excessive exposure to negative content (Reuter and Spielhofer 2017). Social media is an environment that can lay the groundwork for emotional intimacy in an online platform. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic involves some psychosocial problems in addition to physical risks, and resilience appears to be a critical feature to cope with these problems. This study aims to present a model examining the relationships between the psychological tendencies associated with romantic relationships, attachment styles, social media usage, and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. These relationships were investigated in a sample of unmarried adults (n = 289) with a romantic relationship history of at least six months. The average age of the participants was 27 years. As a result of structural equation modelling, anxious and avoidant attachment styles had no effect on the purpose of social media usage and the purpose of social media usage had no effect on psychological resilience. Also, anxious and avoidant attachment styles affected resilience, and this effect was fully mediated by psychological tendencies associated with romantic relationships. The findings reveal the necessity to consider the psychological tendencies associated with romantic relationships in studies aimed at increasing resilience.
... If we are not immediate observers of the event, most of us will search for information on news channels or online. Today, the most up-to-date information on extreme events is often communicated on social media platforms (SMPs) (Keim & Noji, 2011;Oh et al., 2013), particularly Twitter. Sixty percent of Twitter users utilize the platform to seek out news, the highest rate for all SMPs, making it the most popular platform when it comes to finding out about events as they occur in real-time (Shearer & Mitchell, 2021). ...
Situated in New Zealand, Whakaari, also known as White Island, erupted at 2:11pm on December 9, 2019. The fatal eruption received international online attention through Twitter, the most popular social media platform for seeking news. In this paper we investigate how different actors (Twitter users) contributed to the sharing of information about this unfolding extreme event. Our analysis is based on a sample of the most popular tweets posted in the 72 hours following the eruption. We categorize tweets according to different actor groups, each of which play a significant role in shaping online discourse. We analyse content and frequency of messages to identify the messaging behaviour of each group, and their relative impact (i.e., influence). Specifically, our findings indicate that while Media Agencies tweeted and retweeted more messages, Private Individuals (in particular, a first-hand observer) and Emergency Response Agencies achieved the most significant reach and impact per tweet posted. We discuss these initial findings through the lens of goal framing theory and outline the ongoing direction of this research.
... The public can express their concerns about the disaster and mourn the deaths of victims through social media [44]. As a user-based platform, social media can provide potential psychological and emotional support for individuals who have experienced a disaster [45]. Lev-On [46] showed that people who have experienced disasters turn to social media for emotional support. ...
... Social networks such as Twitter, Weibo, and YouTube have greatly facilitated our life, in which people post what they see and hear with friends [1]. Government institutions are using platforms to communicate with their communities [2]. ...
... The IRR value less than 1 shows a negative relationship between predictor and dependent variable; higher than 1 means positive relationship (Hilbe, 2011;Chen et al., 2020) ILS disasters, individuals' social media usage increases (Jin et al., 2014). In such conditions, social media can also contribute to the dissemination of rumors and misinformation (Celik et al., 2021;Keim and Noji, 2011). Thus, people generally attempt to access information from accurate and original sources to verify the information. ...
Purpose
This study aims to explore Twitter posts of Turkish government agencies and the public under a specific hashtag, #NotHolidayButDistanceEducation, specifically related to online distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a thematic analysis on 22,547 original tweets posted by 6,970 users during the first month of online distance education in Turkish K-12 schools. Based on like and retweet counts, the study further explored the extent of stakeholders’ engagement with the observed themes.
Findings
The findings showed that government agencies and citizens used Twitter to provide technical and psychological support, appreciate and motivate stakeholders, demonstrate sample distance education activities, share information and offer suggestions about the ongoing online distance education. It was also observed that the hashtag has been used for expressing negative views about online distance education and for political purposes. A positive relationship was found between social media engagement and providing technical support or sharing information for online distance education.
Practical implications
This study highlights the role of social media in providing practical and emotional support to education stakeholders in times of crisis. Thus, governments can use social media to provide evidence-based psychological and physical health support to their citizens during a pandemic. Social media can serve to improve education practices in schools through the interactions between the public and policymakers.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study can be considered unique because it demonstrates the civic use of social media for educational crisis management. This study highlights the influence of social media in educational policy and practice development in the contemporary era.
... An hypothesis to explore could be that the most marginalized places may have less efficient infrastructures and services (as already addressed in accessibility), with a higher risk to see them dirupted (disconnected) during a disaster and consequently less opportunities to receive assistance. In particular, specific attention should be paid to those communities in remote or isolated areas, that are potentially underserved (Keim & Noji, 2011); ...
This research report presents the conceptual model of analysis of how social media and crowdsourcing in disasters shape social vulnerability. It is based on an in-depth work of literature review and systematization of the results.
Background: This article investigates how people invoked the concept of dignity on Twitter during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a secondary focus on mentions of dignity in the context of older adults and ageing. Methods: We report the results of a study that combines text analytic and interpretive methods to analyze word clusters and dignity-based themes in a cross-national sample of 1,946 original messages posted in 2020. Results: The study finds that dignity discourse on Twitter advances five major themes: (a) recognize dignity as a fundamental right, (b) uphold the dignity of essential workers, (c) preserve the dignity of at-risk populations, (d) prevent cascading disasters that exacerbate dignity's decline, and (e) attend to death, dignity, and the sanctity of life. Conclusions: Moreover, messages focusing on older adults lamented the disproportionate death toll, the terrible circumstances in long-term care homes, the added impact of suspended meal delivery services and the status of older people living below the poverty line.
Link to open source full-text: 10.12688/f1000research.129829.1
COVID-19 outbreak has caused a high number of casualties and is an unprecedented public health emergency. Twitter has emerged as a major platform for public interactions, giving opportunity to researchers for understanding public response to the outbreak. The researchers analyzed 100,000 tweets with hashtags #coronavirus, #coronavirusoutbreak, #coronavirusPandemic, #COVID19, #COVID-19, #epitwitter, #ihavecorona, #StayHomeStaySafe, #TestTraceIsolate. Programming languages such as Python, Google NLP, and NVivo are used for sentiment analysis and thematic analysis. The result showed 29.61% tweets were attached to positive sentiments, 29.49% mixed sentiments, 23.23 % neutral sentiments and 18.069% negative sentiments. Popular keywords include “cases”, “home”, “people” and “help”. We identified “30” such topics and categorized them into “three” themes: Public Health, COVID-19 around the world and Number of Cases/Death. This study shows twitter data and NLP approach can be utilized for studies related to public discussion and sentiments during the COVID-19 outbreak. Real time analysis can help reduce the false messages and increase the efficiency in proving the right guidelines for people.
Afetler insanların olumsuz tutum ve davranışlarının sonucu karşılaşılan yıkıcı etkilere sahip durumlardır. Afetlerden korunmanın en önemli yolu afete sebep olan insanların farkındalıklarının arttırılmasından geçmektedir. Toplumda afet farkındalığının geliştirilmesine yönelik kullanılan birçok araç bulunmaktadır. Bu araçların afiş, broşür, kitapçık, televizyon, radyo, internet ve sosyal medya, çalıştay, sempozyum ve paneller olduğu söylenebilir. Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, toplumda afet farkındalığı oluşturmaya yönelik kullanılan araçların, toplumun afet f arkındalığı üzerindeki etkisinin olumlu ve olumsuz yanlarına değinerek çözüm önerileri sunmaktır. Araştırma, nitel bir araştırma olarak tasarlanmış ve nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden fenomenoloji yaklaşımı benimsenmiştir. Katılımcılar ölçüt örneklem yöntemi kullanılarak Kocaeli ilinde yaşayan ve afet konusunda çalışan kişiler arasından seçilmiştir. Seçilen 12 katılımcı ile yarı yapılandırılmış mülakatlar gerçekleştirilip ses kaydı alınmıştır. Elde edilen verilere MAXQDA 2020 nitel veri analiz programı kullanılarak içerik analizi uygulanmıştır. İçerik analizi sonucunda 6 kategori elde edilmiş olup, bu kategoriler 2 tema altında toplanmıştır. Kocaeli ilinde afet farkındalığı konusunda hazırlanan afiş, broşür ve kitapçıklara yeterince ilgi gösterilmediği sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. İnternet, sosyal medya ve televizyon üzerinden yapılacak bilgilendirmeler daha etkili bir şekilde gerçekleştirilmelidir. Ayrıca, afet farkındalığı konusunda gerçekleştirilen panel, seminer ve çalıştaylara halk katılımı yeterli seviyede sağlanmalıdır.
Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history. With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) and a changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis is high. Some of these new features of social life have created real change in the sociology of disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem to be new is not; rather ICT makes some behaviors more visible, in particular first response and altruistic activities. Even so, with each new crisis event, the calls for technological solutions and policy change come fast and furious, often in absence of empirical research. Our lab is establishing an area of sociologically informed research and ICT development in the area of crisis informatics. Here, we report on some of the challenges and findings when conducting empirical study where the subject of attention is disperse, emergent and increasingly expanding through on-line arenas. We specifically consider the challenge of studying citizen- side information generation and dissemination activities during the April 16, 2007 crisis at Virginia Tech, which we have investigated both on-site and on-line.
Opportunities for participation by members of the public are expanding the information arena of disaster. Social media supports "backchannel" communications, allowing for wide-scale interaction that can be collectively resourceful, self-policing, and generative of information that is otherwise hard to obtain. Results from our study of information practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California Wildfires suggest that community information resources and other backchannel communications activity enabled by social media are gaining prominence in the disaster arena, despite concern by officials about the legitimacy of information shared through such means. We argue that these emergent uses of social media are pre-cursors of broader future changes to the institutional and organizational arrangements of disaster response.
On-line websites and applications are increasingly playing a role in disaster response and recovery. Yet with the wide variety of on-line grassroots activities that occur in such situations, it can be difficult to make sense of them. In this paper, we describe on-line behavior as socially convergent activity, interpreting it within existing sociological understandings of behavior in disaster events. We discuss seven types of convergent behavior and give examples of on-line activities for each type. By seeing these activities as an essential part of the disaster social arena, we can begin to think about how to support socially convergent phenomena in new and creative ways.
We report on the results of an investigation about the "informal," public-side communications that occurred in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech (VT) Shooting. Our on-going research reveals several examples of on-line social interaction organized around the goal of collective problem-solving. In this paper, we focus on specific instances of this distributed problem-solving activity, and explain, using an ethnomethodological lens, how a loosely connected group of people can work together on a grave topic to provide accurate results.
Resilience is the magnitude of disturbance that can be tolerated before a socioecological system (SES) moves to a different
region of state space controlled by a different set of processes. Resilience has multiple levels of meaning: as a metaphor
related to sustainability, as a property of dynamic models, and as a measurable quantity that can be assessed in field studies
of SES. The operational indicators of resilience have, however, received little attention in the literature. To assess a system's
resilience, one must specify which system configuration and which disturbances are of interest. This paper compares resilience
properties in two contrasting SES, lake districts and rangelands, with respect to the following three general features: (a)
The ability of an SES to stay in the domain of attraction is related to slowly changing variables, or slowly changing disturbance
regimes, which control the boundaries of the domain of attraction or the frequency of events that could push the system across
the boundaries. Examples are soil phosphorus content in lake districts woody vegetation cover in rangelands, and property
rights systems that affect land use in both lake districts and rangelands. (b) The ability of an SES to self-organize is related
to the extent to which reorganization is endogenous rather than forced by external drivers. Self-organization is enhanced
by coevolved ecosystem components and the presence of social networks that facilitate innovative problem solving. (c) The
adaptive capacity of an SES is related to the existence of mechanisms for the evolution of novelty or learning. Examples include
biodiversity at multiple scales and the existence of institutions that facilitate experimentation, discovery, and innovation.
Ecosystems provide a wide range of services to society. Some forms of use affect the quality of the ecosystem, reducing its value for other users. This leads to a conflict of interest that is often settled through political processes, resulting in some form of regulation. We link theory on ecosystem response to theories from the socioeconomic branches of science to analyze the mechanisms behind two widespread problems associated with such political solutions. First, they often represent a compromise rather than an integrative solution. We demonstrate that, particularly in sensitive ecosystems, integrative solutions yield a higher average social utility and imply a higher ecosystem quality. Integrative solutions require insight into ecosystems responses to different forms of use and a complete overview of ecosystem services to society. Second, there is a systematic bias away from optimal shared use toward activities that are detrimental to ecosystem quality. This bias arises from the fact that utilities depending on ecosystem quality are often shared by large diffuse groups, whereas pollution and harvesting activities can usually be traced to relatively small and well-organized groups. Theory and data indicate that this type of concentrated group is systematically better at mustering political power than large groups, which find it difficult to realize collective action due to what is known in game theory as “free-rider problems.”
Our analysis suggests that the following three key ingredients are needed to correct the problems of bias and compromise: (a) clear insight into ecosystem dynamic responses to human use, (b) a broad inventory of credible measurements of ecosystem utilities, (c) avoidance of bias due to differences in the organizational power of groups of stakeholders. We argue that good ecosystem models, institutionalized ecosystem valuation, and innovative tax-setting schedules are essential to achieving a socially fair and sustainable use of ecosystems by societies. In addition, we highlight the fact that many environmental problems remain unresolved for a long time and briefly identify the social mechanisms responsible for this delay.
Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors underpinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. This article is a summary of a report prepared on behalf of the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa in 26 August 4 September 2002. We use the concept of resilience--the capacity to buffer change, learn and develop--as a framework for understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of rapid transformations. Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are structured scenarios and active adaptive management. These tools require and facilitate a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.
The combination of the overwhelming nature of disasters and the massive losses they engender gives rise to a complex clinical and social picture with longterm physical, psychological, and social effects on children, families, and communities. The authors suggest that to assess the damage properly, implement interventions on a large scale, keep tabs on rising needs, and restore societal function, mental health professionals must adopt an ecologic systems approach. This approach entails working within and together with related institutions (education, health, local government) and assisting other committed professionals within these institutions to mediate care. This is of utmost importance in the area of children's care because of their particular vulnerability and their special importance for families and society. For this reason, the authors suggest that emergency mental health systems be better designed and implemented while keeping children at the center of their focus. An essential component of the ecologic systems approach is improved education for mental health professionals, providing them the appropriate tools to cope with widespread disaster and the expertise to apply these tools. This approach, however, is not enough. A good outcome cannot be achieved without preparedness on the part of the other relevant institutions and the community as a whole. Greater awareness is needed among local and national authorities of the importance of metaadaptive systems and of local, national, and international networking. In the current global village that is threatened by pervasive terrorism, no community must face it alone. The challenge of a disaster to one community is a challenge to all. By working together we can lessen the devastating impact of these events, save countless lives, prevent untold suffering, and maintain hope for a better world for children.