Abstract
The ubiquity and convenience of smartphones and associated tools, apps, and uses has contributed to a rapid domestication of these technologies (Haddon, 2011). They have become fixtures of everyday life for many people worldwide and they have created new expectations for how we experience both quotidian life and extraordinary events, such as disasters. After all, if Apple can find my iPhone, why can’t the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) use the same methods to locate my house and send help after a hurricane?
While there is ample critical scholarship on popular and everyday uses of these technologies—from dating apps to podcasts, social networking sites to group chats—scholarship about media use by governments or other authorities in times of crisis has tended to remain within organizational communication or policy studies. Such work often takes as its implicit (or explicit) goal the improved efficacy of communications by the state or other authority to a broad audience. As such, it has often had little to say about the specific technological capacities, cultural dimensions, or user groups associated with various forms of crisis communication.
Fortunately, two recent books have taken a much-needed critical approach to the study of new media technologies and disaster, tracing how particular discourses, material histories, and arrangements of power shape the experiences and aftermaths of disasters for people in the United States. Megan Finn’s Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters analyzes three earthquakes in California and the present-day earthquake preparedness structure using archival methods to document the “information infrastructures” of each quake. Finn, a scholar of information studies, develops the concept of “information infrastructure” to capture the overlapping media, material, and interpersonal systems by which information circulates and is used by a particular public to make sense of an earthquake.
Where Finn looks across time and technologies, Hamilton Bean’s Mobile Technology and the Transformation of Public Alert and Warning provides an admirably detailed look at a single technology, the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA), in the United States in the years since 2006. Bean, who was part of a research team funded by the Department of Homeland Security from 2012–2015, draws on federal laws and policies as well as local documentation, informal conversations with professionals in the field, and his detailed knowledge of the practices and procedures involved in issuing emergency alerts to highlight the communicative and cultural challenges that characterized the establishment and implementation of the WEA.
While distinct in focus and methodology, considering these books together reveals three valuable insights concerning new media and disaster: first, that the use of media in crisis conditions is tightly connected to familiar media systems and practices; second, that disasters have become increasingly bureaucratized; and third, that the use of media in disaster has differential impact and efficacy for different groups of people.
The first shared argument—that the use of media technologies in disasters is tightly connected to how people used preexisting, quotidian media systems—is evident throughout Finn’s historical landscape. By nature of the scope of Finn’s work, Documenting Aftermath engages with “new media” not exclusively in its digital forms, but as a study of emergent media in periods of newness (Gitelman, 2008) and emergency, illustrating how “historical cases of disasters offer readers the opportunity to reimagine present technologies, policies, and information infrastructures because the past looks both familiar and foreign” (p. 2). Of course, disruption in information systems can lead to either change or retrenchment, as illustrated in Finn’s discussion of the durability of leading newspapers’ economic and infrastructural power in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire.
Throughout Documenting Aftermath, Finn argues that the “technologies and practices that people use regularly are also the technologies and practices that they lean on in times of disaster” (p. 158). While obviously technologies, government, and social infrastructures have changed over time, Finn demonstrates that in the aftermath of a disaster, many people turned to the very same infrastructures that they already knew—the post office, telegraph, newspapers, radio, television, and social media sites. Furthermore, she explores how the existing material and financial advantages of dominant for-profit companies allowed them to rebound faster than others and take on a leading role in making sense of earthquakes for the public at large.
In her more contemporary chapters, focused on the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the current information order in California, Finn most explicitly describes the possible conflicts between popular information platforms and disaster communications. In 1989, disaster professionals failed to recognize the agency of mass media outlets in telling the story of the earthquake and were surprised by a feedback loop in which officials were both supplying information to the press and relying on mainstream reporting to inform their own work. In the current environment, in which Finn argues that social media would form a crucial component of a postearthquake information order, she highlights a mismatch in expectations and responsibilities. While social media platforms may be practical choices for many people and government agencies to communicate following a disaster, these companies are not held accountable for ensuring a robust infrastructure that could serve the public good in a crisis.
The close relationship between everyday and emergency technologies— and potential misalignments—is also evident in Mobile Technology and the Transformation of Public Alert and Warning. Bean’s work repeatedly demonstrates the ways in which the current WEA system fails to meet the public’s expectations of mobile technology, even as consumer values dominate its development and use. Because of the multimedia and interactive capacities of consumer devices and apps, “people presume that mobile emergency notification processes are more robust than they actually are” (p. 12). The gap in expectations and capacities of WEA is illustrated through detailed discussions of policymaking decisions that initially limited WEA messages to 90 characters, discouraged embedded links, and still do not support maps, infographics, or other multimedia messages.
Bean argues that the WEA system’s failure to meet technological (and related cultural) expectations may reduce the public’s willingness to receive and act on WEA messages, which he demonstrates through analysis of risks, trust, and appropriateness. Concerning risk, he argues that alerting authorities are sensitive to the risks of under- or over-alerting the public, sometimes leading to a failure to send messages that the public may have needed or expected, as in the 2017 California wildfires. The risk of over-alerting is even more pronounced because individuals can opt-out of WEA messages (with the exception of presidential alerts), meaning that at the “slightest irritation” by a poorly targeted or seemingly unnecessary message, people might opt out of all future warning. Concerning trust, Bean recalls the false alert of a ballistic missile targeting Hawai’i, and points to the failure of alerting authorities to engage in public education to build trust and encourage people to take action. Beyond false alarms, the erosion of trust is evident in the confusing messaging about alerts that is put forward by the government, the wireless industry, and device manufacturers. Possible confusion about what WEA is and does leaves people to make what may be poorly informed choices in the interest of convenience, exposing themselves to later risk. Concerning appropriateness, the use of WEA for police manhunts and presidential alerts may further drive people away from these services, as these uses may not seem legitimate given the mandate for the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS, of which WEA is one part) to alert the public to “imminent threats.” The development of WEA as an opt-out service, Bean argues, is one of many indications of the dominance of technocultural values spilling over from consumer technologies to public safety measures with possibly disastrous effects.
The second shared theme in these books is what Finn describes as the growing bureaucratization of disaster response and communications. From 1868—when there was not yet consensus about the cause of earthquakes—to the present day, Finn traces the growth of governmental and related scientific authorities in constructing what she calls the “event epistemologies” through which people understand earthquakes. This enlarged bureaucracy includes scientific organizations, such as the US Geological Survey, as well as government offices such as FEMA, IPAWS, and local emergency management institutions. The historical scope of Documenting Aftermath is important to making this argument, as it demonstrates that such bureaucracy is neither inevitable nor, necessarily, superior to other arrangements of information and resources. Finn’s work documents a gradual growth in the number and types of work associated with disaster response, as well as a growth in public expectations of “official” sources of information and aid.
With growing bureaucracy, Finn finds growing professionalization and hierarchy involved in the production and circulation of information. The establishment of specific communication-focused roles within emergency operating centers, the coordination of multiple centers, and the “all hazards” approach to disaster management in the United States (in which an earthquake is handled following much the same procedure as any other disaster), all contribute to a standardization of emergency response. Despite the efforts of bureaucracy to create standardized, authoritative systems, however, Finn acknowledges the limitations of bureaucracy in her discussions of how media companies, in particular, have their own financial interests and may not work in lockstep with governmental plans. Furthermore, the plans put in place by professional emergency responders carry with them assumptions about the nature of the public and the kind of information that is of value. Even when official emergency response organizations seek out information from the public, via social media or otherwise, the now-entrenched bureaucracy of disaster works to reassert itself as authoritative.
Bureaucracy, as such, is not a focus of Mobile Technology and the Transformation of Public Alert and Warning. However, it is a pervasive undercurrent, given the governmental structures that support WEA, which include the Federal Communications Commission, the FEMA, IPAWS, the National Weather Service, and countless local governmental organizations authorized as “alerting authorities.” Bean lays out in detail the oversight structure and processes by which an alert is issued, including the layers of input and approval that are involved, revealing a constrained and multi-layered communication system in which messages must be carefully crafted and approved before being sent. This is highly informative for readers who may not be familiar with the technologies or bureaucracies in question. In addition, Bean engages in close analysis of policymaking procedures which reveal the role of discourse and negotiations among state and commercial officials in creating the WEA in its current form. These analyses of policymaking discourse convincingly demonstrate the dominance of the technocultural values of consumer convenience, autonomy, and control in shaping the WEA. However, there is an assumption throughout the book that these bureaucratic authorities are working in the interest of the people, and that they ought to be trusted to do so. Bean’s critiques never extend so far as to question the very bureaucratic structures that uphold the WEA system.
The third thread connecting these texts is the argument that the use of technologies in times of crisis can have differential reach and success. One example of this, in both books, is the slow support for providing disaster information in multiple languages; Finn argues that there was a lack of Chinese-language and Spanish-language information in the aftermath of California earthquakes, and Bean reveals that multilingual support remains unavailable for the WEA. By making English the primary (or only) language of disaster media, the public addressed by these systems has been constructed as English-speaking, American, primarily White, and implicitly nondisabled. Those outside this constructed public have often been left to rely upon translations, rumors, or other secondhand information.
Differences of race, class, gender, language, geography, and disability are—and have always been—relevant to how (and if) someone might receive information about a disaster. Bean acknowledges these differences—particularly the lack of attention to people who do not have mobile phones in contemporary alerting practices—but these distinctions are not the focus of his text. There is no discussion, for instance, about how marginalized groups might attempt create access for themselves and their communities if left out of the dominant system. Finn, by contrast, offers several examples of marginalized populations constructing “alternative information infrastructures,” including Chinese-language newspapers during the 1906 earthquake. Her most thorough case is the construction of Spanish-language alternative information infrastructure following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; Spanish-language radio stations translated official government materials, shared information about how to receive federal aid, and connected survivors with family as far away as South America. In each chapter, Finn demonstrates that information infrastructures are multiple and processual, not static or singular in their authority or effects.
Of course, apart from these shared arguments, there are distinct differences between these books. Finn’s work speaks to scholarship in information studies and science and technology studies, anticipating a largely academic audience. The strength of this work lies in its conceptual clarity, which is supported by detailed analysis of primary sources, including illustrations, handwritten letters, photographs, government documents, the statements of social media companies, and even student media journals from 1989. Finn’s work is thorough in the best sense, but perhaps not immediately accessible or actionable for readers outside the academy.
Bean, by contrast, seems to be bringing ideas from media studies and science and technology studies to an audience less familiar with the idea of the social construction of technology. While his work undoubtedly is of interest to scholars in disaster communications, emergency management, and related fields, he is also presenting critical ideas with a practical orientation. Bean writes, it seems, as a quasi-insider to the WEA, a position bolstered by his laser focus and detailed technological and policy analysis. This, in turn, allows the book to address a nonacademic audience, critique the values embedded in the WEA, and offer actionable suggestions for improvement (most notably, an appendix detailing best practices for writing WEA alert messages).
Finally, there are limitations to what these texts offer. One of the clearest limitations is the focus on the United States (and California) as a site for their study of media technologies in disaster. Finn and Bean each gesture abroad, but other countries’ disaster communication systems are framed primarily in terms of how they contrast with the American examples that comprise the bulk of the books’ evidence and argumentation. Furthermore, both texts rely primarily on official documents and discourses for their contemporary analysis, largely leaving out the voices of people who might be the audiences for these disaster preparedness plans or possible alerts. Bean in particular makes good arguments about the problems of opt-out systems for public safety alerts but acknowledges there is a lack of data about the degree to which people do opt out. In the absence of other forms of evidence, the irritation evident on social media and in the popular press does necessarily indicate that there are large numbers of people opting out of WEA and facing attendant risks.
While Documenting Aftermath and Mobile Technology and the Transformation of Public Alert and Warning are, in many ways, very different books, their commonalities indicate the necessity of turning a careful and critical eye to new media technologies during moments of crisis. While this may include commercial systems, such as social media platforms, it also includes a range of often ignored infrastructural systems through which people learn about, experience, and navigate the aftermaths of emergencies. These technological assemblages—the WEA, earthquake information infrastructures, as well as weather reports (Leyda and Negra, 2015), alarms (Siegel, 2011), and panic buttons (Plotnick, 2018)—are also culturally meaningful and imbued with power dynamics that privilege some and fail to serve others.
