Abstract
During Superstorm Sandy’s onslaught, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took to Twitter with an emotional appeal: ‘The rides I took my kids on this summer are in the Atlantic Ocean’. His counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, tweeted news-style dispatches on damage and power restoration (Stelter and Preston, 2012). Beside these elites’ tweets, the public sent 20 million others referencing Sandy in the days of the storm (Drake, 2013).
These examples illustrate differing communication styles, but also mirror the multiple directions one could take when analysing online disaster communication. In the publishing stream addressing the subject, authors often centre on meaning-making and psychological resilience, guidelines for public servants’ use or journalistic content shared by citizens and professionals. Liza Potts employs a different tactic, focusing on the design of technologies, which can impede or smooth the process of communicating during a crisis. Social Media in Disaster Response sets out to enlighten both academics and web developers.
The book is organized around the three phases of content transformation: located first as data, it is then validated as information, and finally redistributed as knowledge. Case studies illustrate these three stages – Hurricane Katrina, the London Underground bombings and the Mumbai terror attacks, respectively.
Understanding the path from data to knowledge is important to both researchers and designers, Potts says. She advocates for both parties to spend more time as active participants online, to see the tension between needs and affordances. During disasters, people turn to familiar tools, not specialized ones. Used in unanticipated ways, spaces often become inadequate. Trapping content, for example, poses a problem, since people operate not in one-site vacuums but across an ecosystem of online resources.
Potts’ anthropological approach centres on experience and specifically on the experience of establishing and transmitting facts. Her retrospective mapping technique might seem unusual to both social media scholars and the software crowd. For the latter audience, the author adjoins sections of practical solutions for the flaws explored in each case study.
Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) is used throughout as a lens for understanding the people, events and tools comprising disaster communication, granting a holistic image. ANT proposes all actors, human and nonhuman share agency in networks. In adapting the theory, Potts is critical of its equal-agency assumption, careful not to exaggerate that of nonhumans.
Potts sidesteps some of the political and moral criticisms of the theory by deploying it in a utilitarian way. ANT is used to formulate actor-network diagrams, which share similarities with the activity flow charts that software designers traditionally use. But while those are a priori and single-user-based, an actor-network diagram locates the central actor, identifies others and weighs their ties after the fact. This method is useful, then, for visualizing relationships and the broader information environment.
Unfortunately, the reader often encounters redundant sections on ANT’s assumptions and usefulness, with little contextualization. It is also curious that ANT, a theory seeming to have some common ground with the concerns of social network analysis, inspires no mention of the latter. At least, it might be helpful to describe actor-network diagrams as some hybrid of sociograms and the traditional flow charts mentioned above. At any rate, these pictograms seem more helpful for developers than academics.
Since the method is solely descriptive, researchers will probably be more interested in the case studies as demonstrations of evolving technological capabilities at the hands of the general public. The Mumbai terror attacks, for example, show how information is ‘pushed’ and redistributed as knowledge. A Google Docs spreadsheet of victims was shared among collaborators who added additional names received via fax. Twitter was used to recruit more participants, and a loose interaction with mass media fully expanded the artefact’s reach. Such passages should fascinate media scholars, as they show emergent communication models through tangible artefacts.
Potts’ book is most satisfying when it interrogates concrete media objects. In Chapter 4, for example, the author explains how an image of Adam Stacey escaping the London Underground became a central artefact during the bombings, allowing us to trace data (the image) into information: its contextualization by other participants. In the practical solutions sections, Potts’ suggestions range from designing badges of recognition for contributors to using Google Earth to help automate some of the validation process. These are more ideas than they are technical instruction. An instructor of design courses might deploy these to get students thinking more creatively.
The book concludes with brief takes on additional disaster cases, often summing up a basic failing encountered with each. Those seeking information about earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, for example, encountered hashtag ‘collisions’, as communicators failed to coalesce around a single anchor point. Some of these outcomes could become fodder for experiments testing information processing in new media environments.
There are a few ideas the book could give greater weight. In her most frequently recurring refrains, Potts calls for developers to understand the need for greater fluidity and access, ostensibly so that the tools they create provide greater societal benefit. In doing so, she takes a somewhat utopian approach to social media. Might there be additional downsides to creating online spaces in this image? Misinformation is discussed, but largely elided: inaccuracies during Hurricane Sandy are shrugged off due to Twitter’s ‘savage self-correction’ (p. 106). Similarly, since we are often urged to re-see online spaces, perhaps a final case study on some of the author’s own applications could be revealing.
Still, Potts manages to balance her disparate readers. Her case studies may appeal to scholars interested in digital media more generally and especially to those who probe its use during catastrophes. The book would be a good supplement for graduate courses on social media to exemplify its changing role in disasters. It may even appeal to those in network analysis as an alternative perspective on information diffusion. Most of all, a focus on solutions means the book would be a good nontechnical primer for web design courses, especially those that focus on designing for interaction. Offering something of value to both audiences is no small accomplishment.