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

过去五年，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，也反映了社交媒体为关键应急任务提供便利的潜力。这些任务包括传播紧急警告和警报；在作出反应的组织之间建立和维持通信网络；以及在危机展开时收集关于公众需求的信息。虽然社交媒体包含了各种各样的技术和实践，但人们特别感兴趣的是在时间有限和动态的条件下交换短文本消息的实践和过程--一种被称为“简明制度”的通信环境。尽管社交媒体在应急管理领域越来越重要，但对应对极端事件的在线交流的研究仍相当年轻，理论发展也相对滞后。这项研究将通过提高我们在紧急情况下管理简明制度沟通过程的衡量和建模能力，并将这些过程与应急管理组织所需的任务联系起来，来填补这一空白。这项研究有可能从根本上改变我们对灾害生命周期中特别关键时刻的危险沟通过程的理解和理论取向。重要的是，这项研究的结果将为未来的决策战略提供必要的经验基础，以便利用社交媒体进行所有危害的警告和公共风险沟通，并将转移到多种渠道；将有助于更好地了解公众之间的网络沟通模式；并将能够预测组织本身将如何在分布式在线环境中采取行动。为了实现这一目标，本研究将开发新的测量技术和形式化的理论模型来理解简明制度下的在线交际行为的动态。这项研究将解决以下问题：在灾难期间，是什么控制着在线公众对特定组织和消息的注意力分配，这对简短消息的重传有何影响？是什么支配着组织的在线简明沟通的动态，以及他们的行为是如何随着危险刺激、公共行为或他们自己的互动而演变的？在信息产生和信息传递方面，非正式的在线回应在时间和空间上有何不同？我们如何才能更好地识别、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，这项研究将开展几项相互关联的活动，包括在三年时间里从一个重要的微博网站收集与灾害有关的沟通的系统、基线控制的纵向骨干样本，并辅之以关于危险、在线警告和警报以及受影响人口的人口和其他信息；收集美国一个主要大都市地区参与应急活动的组织的在线沟通和相互作用的详细数据；开发基于代理人和其他理论驱动的简明信息传输、组织互动和沟通行为的模型，并将注意力分配给在线官方沟通；以及开发新的技术，以衡量公众对危险事件的在线反应，并区分由特定社会进程或特定亚群产生的反应。

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.