Communication TEDxTalk

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The power of mobile and digital communication is very obvious when people are trapped with rising water and need to be rescued. Keri K. Stephens, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin presented a TEDxTalk on September 15, 2018 a Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas. She shared some of the early findings from her team’s research exploring mobile and social media use when Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast in 2017. This research is funded by the National Science Foundation. By studying people who were rescued, along with citizens and official emergency responders, they hope to understand actual call for help during this type of disaster. She was interviewed by a San Antonio paper, and she shared the main points from her talk.

TEDxTalk

It was a bit eerie that this TEDxTalk happened on the same day that Hurricane Florence was causing flooding on the East Coast in 2018. This is almost exactly a year after Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Coast. In many ways, the posts on social media looked very similar. While her team has not analyzed that data yet, these flooding disasters appear to be similar in many ways. First, more rain fell in certain geographic areas than they have seen before. Second, citizen volunteers assisted in those rescues.

What we need to do next

It is important for us to continue studying the intersection between disaster communication and mobile and social media. Communication plays a key role when disasters hit. Issues like a lack of interoperability really matter. There are times that official emergency responders need to keep their communication private. They often have large weather-proof radios that they use for this purpose. But there appear to be times that citizens who are volunteering need to coordinate with official emergency responders. Today, the only option seems to be that they both use their personal mobile phones. In the future, it will be important to study ways to reach interoperability.