Social Media in Disaster Communication

Abstract

This chapter surveys the rapid rise of social media in a range of disaster experiences, reviewing topics of citizen reporting, community-oriented computing, distributed problem solving, and digital volunteerism as forms of socio-technical innovation, as well as topics of situational awareness and veracity as opportunities and challenges that arise from the social media data deluge. The chapter also reviews the research that examines the inclusion of social media technology and data in existing emergency management work. In reflecting on the decade-old field of research, the authors warn of the danger of inadvertently collapsing all “crisis” experiences together without distinction, which tends to happen because social media platforms cross-cut all emergency situations. In an attempt to isolate what social media newly contributes, the tendency is to fail to consider how non-technological factors strongly influence the use of social media itself on collective socio-behavioral scales.