Social Media Resilience During Infrastructure Breakdowns Using Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Social media and instant messaging services are nowadays considered as important communication infrastructures on which people rely on. However, the exchange of content during breakdowns of the underlying technical infrastructures, which sometimes happens based on environmental occurrences, is challenging. Hence, with this paper, we examine the resilience of social media during breakdowns. We discuss communication options and examine ad-hoc functionality for the exchange of social media data between different actors in such cases. To address this, we have developed a concept, which makes use of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) for the spontaneous exchange of information with smartphones. We implemented our concept as the mobile application Social Offline Map (SOMAP) and evaluated it within two iterations (1.0 and 2.0). Finally, we discuss our contribution within the context of related work and the limitations of our approach.