Social Media as Local Crisis Infrastructure: The Interconnected Work of Citizens, Responders, and Journalists in the Social Media Crowd

Abstract

This research considers the role of social media after the deadly 2014 Oso Landslide: how impacted community members, responders, volunteers, and journalists made use (and sometimes did not make use) of social media. Drawing on CSCW, HCI, and Crisis Informatics scholarship that treat social media systems as sites of information work, this study employs several methods to understand social media use after the Oso Landslide including extensive analysis of the public digital record, interviews, sites visits, and post hoc participant observation. Common sampling, computational, and quantitative techniques used by social media researchers are integrated into an interpretivist ethnographic approach thereby enabling an examination of social media use in the broader context of the affected community’s information work following the disaster. This study finds that social media were widely used by citizens, responders, and journalists working within the crisis-affected region. Though social media were not used by everyone in these groups, social media platforms played a substantive role in the information work for each of these groups. In some cases, social media were the primary means for doing certain kinds of information work pertaining to the crises and were integrated into many aspects of the response. The breadth of work and nature of the work taking place through these systems makes these systems candidates for consideration of social media as local crisis infrastructure. Yet, what is visible on social media is only a partial lens into community information work. Institutional arrangements, coordination practices, local cultural practices and sensibilities shape what is visible on social media. A desire for privacy and other practical considerations shape what community members, volunteers, and responders choose to share publicly. Many chose private or semi-private use of social media for community conversation, suggesting an ongoing need for trusted community information intermediaries. In this new kind of infrastructure, traditional regional media continued to play an important role, serving as common resources across responder and citizen interviewees who continued to reply upon news produced by regional journalists that circulated through social media and other mediums. Looking at several key instances of publicly visible online information work over different points of time, this work reveals that the social media work of citizens, responders, and journalists were often inter-dependent. From the earliest tweets raising public awareness of the landslide minutes after it occurred to post-emergency considerations of accountability, future preparedness and mitigation years afterwards, citizens, responders, and journalists played complementary and distinct roles in the production and dissemination of information. Aligned with pre-social media arrangements, journalists in regional news organizations with ties to print and broadcast followed by regional responding organizations were important as information sources. Different from pre-social media arrangements, citizens were active curators and disseminators of information from journalists and responders. This suggests that though social media have reshaped the contributions of citizens, responders, and journalists to public crisis information, their respective contributions remain tied to their social roles, their respective resources, practices, and their specific relationship to the impacted community. Together, these findings suggest that effective community information work is more likely to be the product of synergistic and complementary information work by citizens, responders, and journalists than it is to result from the work of one of these groups alone. Thus though social media has created new platforms for participation, enabling dynamic citizen and responder communication during emergencies, evidence here suggests journalists have not been replaced. Regional journalists were instrumental to civic sensemaking about the landslide from the earliest moments of the crisis through long term recovery. Considering the crisis-related information work of journalists, citizens, and responders as related and interdependent leads to a different way of conceptualizing local crisis infrastructure. Because local journalism is in decline, these findings have consequence for considering the crisis information infrastructures that can support communities in future emergencies.