Ricerc@Sapienza

Social media are playing an increasingly important role during and in the aftermath of natural disasters. Several case studies show how citizens and institutions are using them to spread or gather relevant information, share emotions or support recovery actions. In 2013, Potts defined the role of social media during natural disasters as a ‘largely untapped site of study’ (Potts, 2014, p. 98). Although scholars are now engaging in a growing volume of research in this field, the literature still appears fragmented and overwhelmingly based on single case studies. Furthermore, research seems either to consider ‘social media’ as a whole, without heed to the characteristics of different platforms or to look only at individual platforms, with a disproportionate attention being paid to Twitter. In recent years, as social media have increasingly spread among ordinary users to the point of being defined as ‘mainstream sites of relational maintenance’ (Baym, 2010, p. 134), scholars have started to examine everyday practices that take place on social media platforms, gradually beginning to include Facebook (currently the most popular social media platform worldwide) in their analyses. In addition, research seems to focus either on top-down communication or on bottom-up processes. In this book, we try to overcome this fragmentation by providing a comprehensive framework for analysing the role of social media during natural disasters and by taking into account a wide variety of platforms (with their particular affordances and constraints). By crossing two different dimensions (top-down vs bottom-up processes and information sharing vs information gathering), we identify the four different scenarios that are summarised in the following table: top-down information sharing; citizen information gathering; institutional information gathering; bottom-up information sharing. These scenarios can be summarised in two different but complementary ideal-typical patterns: the traditional model and the networked model. In looking at the traditional model, we can observe the ways in which institutions share disaster-related communication on social media (Chapter 1), while citizens act as audiences for such messages (Chapter 2), following the modes of communication familiar to us from traditional disaster communication. When considering the networked model, on the other hand, we observe the ways in which social media usage can enable innovative practices, ranging from bottom-up information sharing, citizen engagement and digital volunteering (Chapter 3), to enhancing situational awareness through social media, up to social sensing in the event of an earthquake (e.g. research relying on social media to provide estimates of the damage produced by a seismic event Chapter 4). As we shall see in the following chapters, the traditional model is far more widespread than the networked one. From a quantitative point of view, institutions tend to use social media to spread rather than to gather, information; citizens, on the other hand, tend to rely on social media more to gather information rather than to share it. Nevertheless, we believe that such emerging (networked) practices, alongside their consistency with broader transformations we are witnessing in the digital world, can provide relevant insights into earthquake-related communication and contribute to disaster communication processes in a substantial way. We do not believe that the networked pattern is, per se, more desirable than the traditional one; rather, we believe that these categories help gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, while a combination of patterns is needed for more effective communication during and following natural disasters. Moreover, the distinction between the two patterns should not be considered as binary, since different types of overlap occur in concrete communication situations. We do believe, however, that the two mode