Socializing in emergencies—A review of the use of social media in emergency situations

AbstractSocial media tools are integrated in most parts of our daily lives, as citizens, netizens, researchers or emergency responders. Lessons learnt from disasters and emergencies that occurred globally in the last few years have shown that social media tools may serve as an integral and significant component of crisis response. Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management. It becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organizations responding to a disaster. Regardless of the type of emergency, whether a terrorist attack, a hurricane or an earthquake, communication lines may be overloaded and cellular networks overwhelmed as too many people attempt to use them to access information. Social scientists have presented that post-disaster active public participation was largely altruistic, including activities such as search and rescue, first aid treatment, victim evacuation, and on-line help. Social media provides opportunities for engaging citizens in the emergency management by both disseminating information to the public and accessing information from them. During emergency events, individuals are exposed to large quantities of information without being aware of their validity or risk of misinformation, but users are usually swift to correct them, thus making the social media “self-regulating”

ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE (SNS) USE AT THE CAMPUS EMERGENCIES

Recent crisis incidents that have happened at university campuses show the critical importance of information sharing and communication during emergencies. Social networking sites (SNS) are potential communication media which can be used by students’ during such events. This researchin- progress articulates the motivational factors (perceived risk, perceived reward expectations, perceived trust in information accuracy, and perceived usefulness) determining the intention to use online social networking sites during emergencies. The paper ends with the research plan and methodologies to be used as well as the possible implications of this research. This paper will contribute to our understanding of the students’ use of SNS at campus emergencies, while implications will be of great interest to university administrations and emergency departments

The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity

Social sensing services use humans as sensor carriers, sensor operators and sensors themselves in order to provide situation-awareness to applications. This promises to provide a multitude of benefits to the users, for example in the management of natural disasters or in community empowerment. However, current social sensing services depend on Internet connectivity since the services are deployed on central Cloud platforms. In many circumstances, Internet connectivity is constrained, for instance when a natural disaster causes Internet outages or when people do not have Internet access due to economical reasons. In this paper, we propose the emerging Fog Computing infrastructure to become a key-enabler of social sensing services in situations of constrained Internet connectivity. To this end, we develop a generic architecture and API of Fog-enabled social sensing services. We exemplify the usage of the proposed social sensing architecture on a number of concrete use cases from two different scenarios.Comment: Ruben Mayer, Harshit Gupta, Enrique Saurez, and Umakishore Ramachandran. 2017. The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Social Sensing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 21 2017 (SocialSens'17), 6 page

SUCCESSFUL PRACTICES FOR USING SOCIAL MEDIA BY POLICE DEPARTMENTS: A CASE STUDY OF THE MUNICH POLICE

Social media has become a key component of police efforts to achieve public safety goals. To be effective, police must establish guidance on the best way to employ this tool in differing circumstances. Social media crisis communication guidelines for police departments have received little attention to date. Social media can support police in the successful dissemination of time-critical information and hinder the spread of rumors while aiming to remain as responsive as possible. Police departments, as the main formal authorities for establishing safety and security, take on enormous responsibility in management of crises such as terrorist attacks or shooting rampages. This paper conducts a multi-method case study of a 2016 shooting rampage event in Munich that resulted in the Munich police department receiving high praise. We answer three research questions about how social media, and particularly Twitter, played a crucial role in the crisis’ mitigation. In addition, we show the aftereffects of the crisis on social media use by the police department and depict how public reaction to shared content increased and changed during, and then after, the shooting rampage. We conclude the paper by documenting the implicit social media successful practices deployed by the Munich police during this emergency

Understanding the Use of Crisis Informatics Technology among Older Adults

Mass emergencies increasingly pose significant threats to human life, with a disproportionate burden being incurred by older adults. Research has explored how mobile technology can mitigate the effects of mass emergencies. However, less work has examined how mobile technologies support older adults during emergencies, considering their unique needs. To address this research gap, we interviewed 16 older adults who had recent experience with an emergency evacuation to understand the perceived value of using mobile technology during emergencies. We found that there was a lack of awareness and engagement with existing crisis apps. Our findings characterize the ways in which our participants did and did not feel crisis informatics tools address human values, including basic needs and esteem needs. We contribute an understanding of how older adults used mobile technology during emergencies and their perspectives on how well such tools address human values.Comment: 10 page

Framing social media and web-based communities within the COVID-19 pandemic: enduring social isolation and subsequent deconfinement

As images circulate of people, all around the world, watching their cities from their windows and balconies, a sense of solemnity emerges. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to seclusion in an attempt to control contagion. The social isolation deriving from the adoption of containment strategies have displaced social interaction to online settings. Social media and web-based communities assume an increasingly central role in this scenario of pandemic, with an ever-growing number of people turning to these platforms to maintain social connection, to obtain information and to keep a sense of community. This paper aims to examine and frame the role of social media and web-based communities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reviews current literature to propose a framework based on five main purposes of social media use and web-based communities: preserving physical health, promoting mental health, tending to education/business, searching and sharing information and socializing.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Role of social media during Kerala floods 2018

For almost 19 years social media has been used in crisis management. During the time of natural disasters like flood, earthquake or cyclone, when all the other modes of communications are found incapable, these social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc. are found to be the most efficient and beneficial. The present study discusses the role of social media during the Kerala Flood 2018. Results show that During the flood; Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram are found to be used by majority of the respondents. Most of the respondents spend more than 3 hours on Whatsapp followed by Instagram and Facebook during the flood. For the information regarding the location status of friends and family, majority of respondents used Facebook followed by Whatsapp and Instagram. During the flood, majority of the respondents used the hashtag #Keralafloods, followed by #Keralafloodrelief, #cmdrf and #Keralaflood

A systematic literature review on information systems for disaster management and proposals for its future research agenda

Emergency management information systems (EMIS) are fundamental for responding to disasters effectively since they provide and process emergency-related information. A literature stream has emerged that corresponds with the increased relevance of the wide array of different information systems that have been used in response to disasters. In addition, the discussion around systems used primarily within responder organizations broadened to systems such as social media that are open to the general public. However, a systematic review of the EMIS literature stream is still missing. This literature review presents a timeline of EMIS research from 1990 up to 2021. It shows the types of information system scholars focused on, and what disaster response functions they supported. It furthermore identifies challenges in EMIS research and proposes future research directions