Collaborative Research: Online Hazard Communication in the Terse Regime: Measurement, Modeling, and Dynamics

在过去五年中，应急管理组织对社交媒体的使用激增，这既反映了普通民众越来越多地使用社交媒体技术，也反映了社交媒体在促进关键应急响应任务方面的潜力。 这些任务包括：传播紧急警报和警戒;建立和维持应急组织之间的通信网络;随着危机的发展收集关于公众需要的信息。 虽然社交媒体包含各种各样的技术和做法，但人们特别关注的是在时间有限和动态条件下交换短信的做法和过程-这种通信环境被称为“简洁制度”。“尽管社交媒体在应急管理领域越来越重要，但应对极端事件的在线沟通研究仍然相当年轻，理论发展也滞后。 这项研究将填补这一空白，通过提高我们的能力来衡量和建模的过程中，在紧急情况下，管理简洁的制度沟通，并将这些应急管理组织所需的任务。 这项研究有可能从根本上改变我们的理解和理论方向，以简洁的危险通信过程中，在一个特别关键的时间在灾害生命周期。重要的是，这项研究的结果将提供必要的经验基础，为未来的决策战略提供信息，以便利用社交媒体进行所有危害的警报和公共风险沟通，并将转移到多个渠道;将导致更好地了解公众之间的网络沟通模式;并且能够预测组织本身在分布式在线环境中的行为方式。 为了实现这一目标，本研究将开发新的测量技术和正式的理论模型，以了解在简洁的制度在线交际行为的动态。 该研究将解决以下问题：是什么决定了灾难期间在线公众对特定组织和消息的注意力分配，以及这如何影响简洁消息的转发？是什么支配着组织的在线简洁制度通信的动态，以及他们的行为如何演变以应对危险刺激、公共行为或他们自己的互动？ 非正式的在线回应在信息生产和信息传递方面如何跨越时间和空间？ 我们如何更好地识别、检测和测量应对危险事件的在线交流过程？ 为了回答这些问题，研究将开展几项相互关联的活动，包括在三年期间从一个著名的微型博客网站上收集与灾害有关的通信的系统的、基线控制的纵向骨干样本，并辅之以关于灾害、在线警告和警报以及受影响人口的人口统计和其他信息;收集有关美国主要大都市地区参与应急响应活动的组织之间的在线通信和互动的详细数据;为简明的信息传递、组织互动和通信行为以及对在线官方通信的关注分配开发基于代理人的模型和其他理论驱动的模型;开发新技术，以衡量公众对灾害事件的在线反应，并区分特定社会进程或特定亚群体产生的反应。

Social media use by emergency management organizations has surged in the past five years, reflecting both the increasing use of social media technologies by the general population and the potential for social media to facilitate key emergency response tasks. These tasks include diffusion of emergency warnings and alerts; establishing and maintaining networks of communication among responding organizations; and collecting information on public needs as the crisis unfolds. While social media encompasses a diverse array of technologies and practices, particular interest has converged on the practices and processes of short text message exchange under time constrained and dynamic conditions - a communication context known as the "terse regime." Though social media are an increasingly important fixture of the emergency management landscape, the study of online communication in response to extreme events is still quite young and theory development has lagged. This research will fill this gap by advancing our ability to measure and model the processes governing terse-regime communication in emergency settings, and by linking these to the tasks required of emergency management organizations. This research has the potential to fundamentally transform our understanding of and theoretical orientation to terse hazard communication processes at a particularly critical time in the disaster life cycle. Importantly, the findings from this research will provide the empirical basis necessary to inform future decision making strategies to utilize social media for warnings and public risk communication across all hazards and will be transferable to multiple channels; will lead to greater understanding of the networked patterns of communication among the public; and will enable the prediction of how organizations themselves will act in a distributed, online environment. To accomplish this, this research will develop novel measurement techniques and formal theoretical models for understanding the dynamics of online communicative behavior in the terse regime. The research will address the following questions: What governs the allocation of attention of the online public to specific organizations and messages during disaster, and how does this affect retransmission of terse messages? What governs the dynamics of organizations' online terse-regime communications and how does their behavior evolve in response to hazard stimuli, public behavior, or their own interactions? How does informal online response vary across time and space in terms of both message production and message transmission? And how can we better recognize, detect, and measure online communicative processes in response to hazard events? To answer these questions, the research will pursue several linked activities including the collection of a systematic, baseline controlled longitudinal backbone sample of hazard-related communication from a prominent micro-blogging site over a three year period, supplemented by demographic and other information on hazards, online warnings and alerts, and the impacted populations; collection of detailed data on online communication by and interactions among organizations involved in emergency response activities in a major U.S. metropolitan area; development of agent-based and other theory-driven models for terse message transmission, organizational interaction and communication behavior, and allocation of attention to official communications online; and development of novel techniques for measuring the public's online response to hazard events and for distinguishing between responses generation by specific social processes or by particular sub-populations.