Social media and its impact on crisis communication: Case studies of Twitter use in emergency management in Australia and New Zealand

There is a growing awareness worldwide of the significance of social media to communication in times of both natural and human-created disasters and crises. While the media have long been used as a means of broadcasting messages to communities in times of crisis – bushfires, floods, earthquakes etc. – the significance of social media in enabling many-to-many communication through ubiquitous networked computing and mobile media devices is becoming increasingly important in the fields of disaster and emergency management. This paper undertakes an analysis of the uses made of social media during two recent natural disasters: the January 2011 floods in Brisbane and South-East Queensland in Australia, and the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. It is part of a wider project being undertaken by a research team based at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, that is working with the Queensland Department of Community Safety (DCS) and the EIDOS Institute, and funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through its Linkages program. The project combines large-scale, quantitative social media tracking and analysis techniques with qualitative cultural analysis of communication efforts by citizens and officials, to enable both emergency management authorities and news media organisations to develop, implement, and evaluate new social media strategies for emergency communication.

Social media and journalism during times of crisis

Around lunchtime on 22 February 2011, the New Zealand city of Christchurch – the country’s second largest city – was hit by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. Built on a geological faultline, like Los Angeles and Tokyo, Christchurch is no stranger to tremors; indeed, it had experienced a magnitude 7.1 quake just months before, in September 2010, and technically, this new earthquake was no more than an aftershock of the earlier tremor. That earlier quake had caused significant structural damage, but no fatalities, but the February earthquake was different: with its epicentre located no more than ten kilometres from the Christchurch city centre, at a depth of only five kilometres, it proved considerably more destructive – and it affected buildings whose structural integrity had already been severely compromised by the September quake, in the middle of a weekday when schools and city offices would have been fully occupied. While the full death toll has yet to be determined, it is estimated at close to 200.

Cumulative and comparative social media analytics for crisis communication

This paper draws on comparative analyses of Twitter data sets – over time and across different kinds of natural disasters and different national contexts – to demonstrate the value of shared, cumulative approaches to social media analytics in the context of crisis communication.

The Global Financial Crisis : Neo-Liberalism, Social Democracy, and Criminology

This chapter begins with a discussion of the economic, political, and social context of the recent global financial crisis, which casts into relief current boundaries of criminology, permeated and made fluid in criminology's recent cultural turn. This cultural turn has reinvigorated criminology, providing new objects of analysis and rich and thick descriptions of the relationship between criminal justice and the conditions of life in ‘late modernity’. Yet in comparison with certain older traditions that sought to articulate criminal justice issues with a wider politics of contestation around political economies and social welfare policies of different polities, many of the current leading culturalist accounts tend in their globalized convergences to produce a strangely decontextualized picture in which we are all subject to the zeitgeist of a unitary ‘late modernity’ which does not differ between, for example, social democratic and neo-liberal polities, let alone allow for the widespread persistence of the pre-modern. It is argued that that contrary to this globalizing trend there are signs within criminology that life is being breathed back into social democratic and penal welfare concerns, habitus, and practices. The chapter discusses three of these signs: the emergence of neo-liberalism as a subject of criminology; a developing comparative penology which recognizes differences in the political economies of capitalist states and evinces a renewed interest in inequality; and a nascent revolt against the ‘generative grammar’, ‘pathological disciplinarities’, and ‘imaginary penalities’ of neoliberal managerialism.

Social innovation to solve homelessness : wicked solutions for wicked problems

Homelessness is a complex problem that manifests in all societies. This intractable and ‘wicked’ issue resists single-agency solutions and its resolution and requires a large, on-going investment of financial and professional resources that few organisations can sustain. This paper adopts a social innovation framework to examine government and community sector responses to homelessness. While recent evaluations and policy prescriptions have suggested better integrated and more co-ordinated service delivery models for addressing homelessness, there is little understanding of the innovation framework in which alternative service system paradigms emerge. A framework that identifies/distils and explains different innovation levels is put forward. The framework highlights that while government may lead strategic level innovations, community organisations are active in developing innovation at the service and client level. Moreover, community organisations may be unaware of the innovative capacity that resides in their creative responses to resolving social crisis and marginalisation through being without shelter.

Policing the rural crisis

There is a growing sense of crisis in rural ways of life, which manifests itself in economic decline, depopulation, depleted environments, and a crisis of rural identities. Crime is one potent marker of crisis, the more so as it spoils the image of healthy, cohesive community. The social reaction it elicits, the policing of this ‘other rural’, is also a guide to the dimensions of crisis. The social sciences have witnessed a renewed international interest in the study of ‘other rurals’: the neglected, invisible or excluded aspects of country life. This book brings a fresh approach to the study of crime that challenges the urban-centric assumptions of much western criminology and sociology. It explores rural crime and social reactions to it, in relation to processes and patterns of community formation and change in rural Australia, including the social, economic, cultural and political forces shaping the history, structure and everyday life of rural communities. Policing the Rural Crisis is based on five years of extensive original empirical research in rural and regional Australia. It draws on ideas and debates in contemporary social theory across several disciplines, making the analysis relevant to the study of crime and social change elsewhere.

Social clubs and social capital : the effect of electronic gaming machines in disadvantaged regions on the creation or destruction of community resilience

The role of particular third sector organisations, Social Clubs, in supporting gambling through the use of EGMs in venues presents as a difficult social issue. Social Clubs gain revenue from gambling activities; but also contribute to social well-being through the provision of services to communities. The revenues derived from gambling in specific geographic locales has been seen by government as a way to increase economic development particularly in deprived areas. However there are also concerns about accessibility of low-income citizens to Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMS) and the high level of gambling overall in these deprived areas. We argue that social capital can be viewed as a guard against deleterious effects of unconstrained use of EGM gambling in communities. However, it is contended that social capital may also be destroyed by gambling activity if commercial business actors are able to use EGMs without community obligations to service provision. This paper examines access to gambling through EGMs and its relationship to social capital and the consequent effect on community resilience, via an Australian case study. The results highlight the potential two-way relationship between gambling and volunteering, such that volunteering (and social capital more generally) may help protect against problems of gambling, but also that volunteering as an activity may be damaged by increased gambling activity. This suggests that, regardless of the direction of causation, it is necessary to build up social capital via volunteering and other social capital activities in areas where EGMS are concentrated. The study concludes that Social Clubs using EGMs to derive funds are uniquely positioned within the community to develop programs that foster social capital creation and build community resilience in deprived areas.

Journalism as social networking : the Australian youdecide project and the 2007 federal election

The increasing prevalence of new media technologies and the rise of citizen journalism has coincided with a crisis in industrial journalism –as the figure of the "journalist as hero" is fading, new media forms have facilitated the production of news content "from below" by citizens and "pro-am" journalists. Participation in an action-research project run during the 2007 Australian Federal Election, youdecide 2007, allowed the authors to gain first-hand insights into the progress of citizen-led news media in Australia, but also allowed us to develop an account of what the work of facilitating citizen journalism involves. These insights are important to understanding the future of professional journalism and journalism education, as more mainstream media organizations move to accommodate and harness user-created content. The paper considers the relevance of citizen journalism projects as forms of R&D for understanding news production and distribution in participatory media cultures, and the importance of grounded case studies for moving beyond normative debates about new media and the future of journalism.

Researching for social justice: Contextual, conceptual and methodological challenges

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with 'crisis' conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the 'productive pedagogies' and the 'unofficial curriculum' of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights.

Things just got really serious : coping in crisis

You have chosen to enter a profession that can afford you a wonderfully rich career. It is a role that has many areas of speciality and many opportunities and challenges in communicating with a vast array of people including patients, families, peers, and management. Inherent in the role are all sorts of potential stressors such as not having the equipment you need at a time you think you crucially need it, working with people you find difficult, shift work, lack of staffing, overcrowding, and the list is sometimes seemingly endless. But there are also obvious advantages to your role such as meeting a large variety of people, helping people to recover, to feel comfortable in your care and supporting families, patients and colleagues. This brings me to the two primary points to this chapter. The first point of this chapter is to understand that sometimes the challenges you may face in the health arena overwhelm your initial understanding of your capacity to cope. That is to say, there will likely be times when you feel overwhelmed or even distraught in the face of a particular situation. The second point is that these same overwhelming experiences can provide a catalyst for you to grow as a human being; to develop beyond the person you perceived yourself to be beforehand. According to Aaron Antonovsky (1985), stress is inherent in the human condition, but further to that, in your role, there is a very high possibility of traumatic experiences as well.

#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods

Social media, including Facebook and Twitter, played an important role in crisis communication at the height of the 2011 South East Queensland floods crisis (10-16 January). This report examines the role of the short-messaging system Twitter in disseminating and sharing crisis information and updates from state and local authorities as well as everyday citizens. We assess the overall use of Twitter, as well as that of the most important emergency service account, the Queensland Police’s @QPSMedia account.