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Widespread disasters can overload official agencies’ capacity to provide assistance, and often citizen-led groups emerge to assist with disaster response. As social media platforms have expanded, emergent rescue groups have many ways to harness network and mobile tools to coordinate actions and help fellow citizens. This study used semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation techniques to better understand how wide-scale rescues occurred during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooding in the Greater Houston, Texas USA area. We found that citizens used diverse apps and social media-related platforms during these rescues and that they played one of three roles: rescuer, dispatcher, or information compiler. The key social media coordination challenges these rescuers faced were incomplete feedback loops, unclear prioritization, and communication overload. This work-in-progress paper contributes to the field of crisis and disaster response research by sharing the nuances in how citizens use social media to respond to calls for help from flooding victims.
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Throw me a lifeline: Articulating mobile social network dispersion and the social construction of risk in rescue communication
This research develops a model of mobile social network dispersion in rescue communication, and illustrates how people use a combination of mobile and social media, along with real-time communication, in their decision-making process. Guided by established research on smartphones, social media, and affordances, we used a qualitative approach and conducted field interviews that included photo-elicitation interview (PEI) techniques to examine participants’ private social media data. Our analysis of these rescue decisions reveals why so few people used the official 9-1-1 system. We show how rescue communication often occurs through a socially constructed assessment of risk that involves persuasion by trusted others in their network, regardless of professional qualifications. Furthermore, trusted others can function as proxies and can draw upon mobile social network affordances, helping to compensate for material limitations. The affordances people drew from can be organized into two sets: foundational and amplification. Hierarchical relationships exist among these sets of affordances, and materiality plays a pivotal role in rescue communication. Ultimately, our analysis uncovers the multimodality around people’s decisions to ask for help.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1760453
- PAR ID:
- 10549269
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mobile Media & Communication
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2050-1579
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 149-169
- Size(s):
- p. 149-169
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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