Alexander, D. (2014). Social Media in Disaster Risk Reduction and Crisis Management.

From Digital Culture & Society

Alexander, D. (2014). Social Media in Disaster Risk Reduction and Crisis Management. Science & Engineering Ethics, 20(3), 717-733. [1]

Ashley Williams

Social media has the power to reach a large audience in a short amount of time. There are risks and dilemmas that can arise from unregulated communication. In regards to emergency management social media, when used correctly, can be a powerful tool used to help inform victims and the public on statistics, facts and the next steps. The positive side of social media is balanced with the negative potential to misuse social media especially during sensitive situations. Ethical use of social media is of most importance during emergency situations to ensure that the public is receiving accurate information.

Alexander’s thesis for his paper is to “offer a review of the use of social media in disasters and major incidents” (2014, p.718). He suggests there are seven ways social media is used during disaster response, recovery and risk reduction. The seven ways are described as, listening to public debate, monitoring situations, extending emergency response and management, crowd-sourcing and collaborative development, creating social cohesion, furthering causes, and enhancing research. He discusses the benefits and negative connotations of using social media in emergency situations and the ethical implications of social media during disasters. The negative side of social media is described as the rumour propagation, the dissemination of false information, and the potential for social media to help orchestrate crime. When reviewing the potential drawbacks for social media, the Great Southwest Blackout is used as an example to illustrate social media’s physical weakness when there is no power to run the technological devices. He concludes his paper with examples of successful social media use during disasters, and suggests, “the field is in the early stages of rapid evolution in relation to both technological development and social acceptance” (2014, p.719).

The strengths of Alexander’s paper include his clear thesis and organisation of key points with subheadings. He clearly defines the term social media in the context that he discusses in his paper, as “blogs, micro-blogs, social bookmarking, social networking, forums, collaborative creation of documents (via wikis) and the sharing of audio, photographic and video files” (2014, p.718). A distinction is made between social media and the social aspects of mass media, which include conventional forms of dissemination of information like radio and television. This is another strength of the paper as Alexander makes it clear to the reader that he is discussing social media. The dichotomy of social media used in disaster and crisis viewed as positive or negative is balanced throughout the paper and makes it easy to comprehend. Alexander does a good job of stating the facts without being bias while describing the seven ways social media can be used in disaster risk reduction and crisis response. He uses examples of recent disasters to help illustrate his points. These examples include the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, and the floods in Queensland, Australia. He states that “there is a continuum between command-based and collaborative models of emergency management” (2014, 721) and elaborates on this point that people in command tend to be authoritarian. There is no clear hierarchical structure in social media so it is at odds with the already existing models of emergency management. Alexander touches on being able to avoid government communication methods when using social media. He uses statistics when discussing crowd sourcing, in saying “it is suggested that 1% of the crowd will create content, 10% will validate it and 89% will use it” (2014, p.723). I think that the statistic’s used in this example helped strengthen the paper.

While discussing the negative side of social media, Alexander uses examples to strengthen his paper. He uses Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as an example of when people were sharing “Photoshop-style image manipulation” (2015, p.725) of the storm. He uses the example of the Great Southwest Blackout to illustrate another potential drawback of social media as a physical weakness when the power is out. A strong comparison made is in the comment “whether the advantages and disadvantages of social media with respect to disaster mitigation and response are significantly different to those of traditional media” (2014, p.726). He uses the Kony 2012 example as a video that reached 100 million views on Youtube, and “has been widely criticized for being significantly inaccurate and misleading” (2014, p.726). He says that this can easily happen in disasters, and argues with the example of L’Aquila earthquake of 2009 , “that the conventional media are just as capable as social media of picking up a misleading story and vigorously propagating it” (2014, p.726). He makes a point about the ethics behind social media and that the dissemination of emergency information is not equal because for a variety reasons, there are people who do not use social media. There are also places such as China and Islam where the government dictates the Internet, and this also effects what the public can gain from social media. While discussing the recent successes in the use of social media in disaster, Alexander points to a website called Truthy that was created by researchers at the University of Indiana that is used to monitor rumours and misuses on Twitter. He gives the url (truthy.indiana.edu) to allow the reader to continue take their research beyond the paper.

One of the weaknesses that I found in this paper was a concept quoted from Helsloot and Ruitenberg (2004) stating, “citizens are widely recognized to be the real first responders after disaster: they hold the key to the use of social media as an extension of emergency management” (p.722). I thought this statement was unnecessary and was disrespectful to paramedics, police officers, and fire fighters to suggest that they are not the first responders after a disaster has occurred. He also brings up the concern for trust and privacy while using social media, which is a very important discussion, but does not elaborate much most likely because the focus of his paper is about disaster management. While discussing the social media he sates “the first ‘modern disaster’ was probably the famine and starvation that occurred in the Biafran war of secession from Nigeria in 1967-1970” (2014, 728). There is no doubt that this occurrence was a disaster but it is a subjective statement to make, therefore I think it weakened his paper. In the conclusion of his paper he admits that a weakness to his paper is that “there are still many aspects of social media usage in crisis that are not adequately understood… one of these is the influence of gender on perception, attitudes and behaviours regarding the usage of the new media” (2014, p.730). Once more is understood about social media in the field, further research will be done.