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

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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.