Social Media and Disaster Recovery Beyond the Community

Social Media and Disaster Recovery: Beyond the Community of Practice Approach DR ALEX LAMBERT ALEX. LAMBERT@MONASH. EDU

Source: National Recovery Handbook, Series 2

Lambert, A. (2016) ‘Disaster Data Assemblages: Five Perspectives on Social Media in Response and Recovery’. Conference paper presented at the Hawaiian International Conference on Systems Science. Kauai: IEEE ◦ ◦ Repurposing of flexible infrastructure and labour Continuum of organisational formality Trans-local but localised Aims at speed and efficiency – real time actionable intelligence (situation awareness)

Mariela Diaz – Director of Emergency Management, DHHS To be totally frank, you can’t speak for me without me giving you permission to speak for me. It might be that the only thing you and I share is our community. We’ve both lost our houses, but who are you to speak for me and what I need? I haven’t selected you beforehand, I don’t know you. You don’t represent me and you don’t know what my needs are. Often there are people going, “Me, me, me. ” Squeaky wheel, some of them. But they’re actually not the right person to represent the elderly of that community. Or the children of that community. Or the migrants of that community.

Michele Dunscombe – Kinglake Community Manager Yeah, well, social media is a really interesting space and we – we do have a community page that was set up post fires um, for the Kinglake community for people to be able to share what’s going on and things like that, but typically, what happens with those sorts of pages, sometimes they can become a bit of a whinge fest. And then you get local people in the community trolling, so social media’s not so much a safe platform to share stories.

Mary Farrow – Emerald Community House There's certainly known trolls in the town who will gun for people and when they do and you go up against them the rest of the community is silent as they watch it. But this is about public bullying, twisting of the information, trying to contort things just by writing about it on social media and using language that sounds like you don't know what you're talking about. Some people say well you should just back off and leave him. It's like oh no. I've given the last word when I'm ready. I give it to him.

Mel Irons – Ph. D online emergency management I had to ban one guy who was this 18 year old guy who really wanted to help and he could not understand why I was not making him an admin. So he was getting quite belligerent on the page and I only had to block one person which is extraordinary considering the stress of the event, how high emotions were running. It could have really turned into a disaster.

Kate Seibert – Director of Recovery, EMV People just – they react. They don’t think about privacy. So, ah, I think we’ve got to just keep on focusing on where the opportunities are for connection.

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Ryan Rhenolds – Gap Filler And like very clever for Facebook. So for a number of years, they get entirely reliant on using their platform to communicate to our potential followers, and now we can't actually reach the followers that we’ve spent years building up because Facebook is creating these small, niche, kind of monocultures in a way, I fear.