New Media in Times of Crisis

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Contributors examine the latest practices for communicating during crises, including evacuation practices, workplace safety challenges, crisis social media usage, and strategies for making emergency alerts on U.S. mobile phones constructive and helpful. The book is grounded in the practices of first responders, crisis communicators, people experiencing tragic events, and communities who organize on- and off-line to make sense of their experiences. The authors draw upon a wide range of theories and frameworks with the goal of establishing new directions for research and practice.

how the book the begins

Fires can level cities and oil spills threaten the environment. School shootings are too frequent and shake the confidence of the public. Sometimes there is advance warning when tragedy strikes, but often these events are unpredictable, and they always generate high levels of uncertainty. In these times of crisis, communication matters. The focus of this book is to understand human behavior—specifically organizing—now that people have so many forms of new media to use when communicating.

How did we make this so interdisciplinary?

In this book, our scholars represent a host of disciplines—organizational communication, public relations, computer science, civil engineering—therefore, they will use terms like crisis and new media in slightly different ways. We view this as a strength in our research because we can begin to build a common vocabulary that allows us to collaborate on truly interdisciplinary projects. Engaging these topics through an interdisciplinary lens is not only our goal, it was our mode of operation. These authors met in person to challenge one another to think more broadly about the research they each do. During these meetings, we invited crisis communication practitioners and first responders to participate in our dialog and help us shape this contribution. We kept their messages in mind as we crafted our chapters. Their perspectives were so important to our mission that we have included some of those practitioners in our work. Learn more about the contributing authors whose research examines how people organize during crises.