Social Media in Disaster Response

How Experience Architects Can Build for Participation

Liza Potts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415817417
• eBook ISBN: 9781134063147
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Social Media in Disaster Response focuses on how emerging social web tools provide researchers and practitioners with new opportunities to address disaster communication and information design for participatory cultures. Both groups, however, currently lack research toolkits for tracing participant networks across systems; there is little understanding of how to design not just for individual social web sites, but how to design across multiple systems. Given the volatile political and ecological climate we are currently living in, the practicality of understanding how people communicate during disasters is important both for those researching solutions and for those putting that research into practice.

Social Media in Disaster Response addresses this situation by presenting the results of a large-scale sociotechnical usability study on crisis communication in the vernacular related to recent natural and human-made crisis; this is an analysis of the way social web applications are transformed, by participants, into a critical information infrastructure in moments of crisis. This book provides researchers with methods, tools, and examples for researching and analyzing these communication systems while providing practitioners with design methods and information about these participatory communities to assist them in influencing the design and structure of these communication systems.

1

EXPERIENCE, DISASTER, AND THE SOCIAL WEB

From 26 to 29 November 2008, the Mumbai attacks in India caused countless social web participants to mobilize, locating data, verifying information, and distributing knowledge across the globe. This terrorist event resulted in 166 civilian deaths and at least 304 injuries. Across the city, terrorists hit 12 locations (Chief Investigating Officer, Government of India 2009). From explosions and gunfire at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel to the atrocities committed at the Nariman House, they affected numerous transportation systems and tourism sites. Locations as diverse as cafés, hotels, hospitals, and railway stations were attacked. Throughout this multiday event, many volunteers online and reporters in the mainstream media took on the challenging knowledge work of locating and validating information from eyewitnesses.

Mumbai was a major tipping point for online participation during times of disaster. From the use of Google Docs and Twitter to the uploading of numerous images to Flickr, this event began a new era for the social web—an era that systems developers can no longer ignore. The industry and the field must move past thinking within their single-serving interfaces, systems, documents, and silos if they are to meet the needs of new social knowledge workers. While these platforms were not built to move information across systems, participants invented connections in order to find and share information related to the attacks. And while participants did their best to bridge these systems, they encountered many obstacles and challenges as they attempted to exchange information about the attacks.

In this book, I define social web ecosystems, explain methods for researching the participatory use of these systems, and discuss the need for an interdisciplinary team led by experience architects to build them. Experience architects look across ecosystems, building for experiences that move across spaces, systems, and networks. I demonstrate how we can trace the ways everyday people deploy social web technologies to share and exchange content. In the case studies in this book, I specifically examine disaster situations. However, I also explain how we can generalize these experiences to other kinds of use and experience within digital spaces. I explain why humanists and technologists are especially well placed to lead this tracing and building—primarily because of our understandings of culture, use, and context. We can coordinate—if not guide—the activities of design and development teams. Lastly, this book discusses in detail the ways we can bring about better architectures for everyday social web situations. I make these moves by explicitly resituating this work as experience architecture, pointing to the need for understanding the experiences of participants who leverage these technologies.

Such an examination is, in itself, an interdisciplinary task; any analysis of the building tools for the social web must take into account the many systems that mediate communication among people, organizations, and technologies. By discussing the need for shared perspectives across humanities and sciences, industry and academia, this book calls for the kinds of research and practice that can move us beyond traditional practices and into the new paradigm of the experience architect.

Architecting Mediated Systems

In this book, I set out to define, illustrate, and encourage the architecting and researching of mediated systems for the social web—systems built for holistic experiences that span multiple technologies, people, and organizations. They are systems that help mediate communication by interacting, structuring, and architecting the flow of information among actors. We can build such systems if we understand them as participatory ecosystems that must allow for flexibility and responsiveness.

When discussing the process of architecting mediated systems, the map of the London Underground is a useful example. Originally designed by Harry Beck in 1933, this popular illustration of the London Underground (i.e., the London subway system) has been updated and is currently in use by Transport for London (2012). This map is an excellent illustration of the ways networks can be abstracted for those who use them. The map represents an imagined London—the points on the map do not directly correlate with the physical geography aboveground. This imagined London, however, provides commuters with a tangible artifact that they can identify with to connect the concept of physical space with their personal transportation needs. In discussing the map’s significance, travel author Bill Bryson (2001) notes how Beck “created an entirely new, imaginary London that has very little to do with the disorderly geography of the city above” (41). Although it could potentially mislead travelers since it does not match geographical reality, Beck’s work better communicates how to navigate the Underground. This map creates a world that brings a sense of order that better serves the needs of its audience. That is, the map creates a sense of order in symmetry.

Much like these maps, social web systems often represent a disconnect between what practitioners design for and what individuals actually need in these systems. ¹ Our job as researchers and practitioners is to help bring order out of chaos in these imagined spaces. Any viable solution must push beyond the current user-centered design paradigms if we are to architect systems that provide solutions.

Experience Architecture

Although many of the case studies that I examine in this book focus on experience architecture issues, the problems associated with using these technologies are not purely issues of user interface, interaction design, and information design. In fact, broader issues for experience architects emerge in social web experiences. Other problems relate to systems that lie beneath the surface—systems that dictate data structures, permit reuse, or allow for sharing across systems. For the sake of sanity, throughout this book, I refer primarily to “experience architecture,” although I also use terms such as “information design,” “user experience,” “design,” “communication design,” and “technical communication.” Unless I am making an explicit distinction, I use these terms synonymously to discuss the architecture of the systems both above and below the surface (i.e., architecture of interactions, visuals, content, structure, and policy).

This concept of experience architecture is not particularly new. What is new is the idea that we need to work in teams with diverse backgrounds in writing, design, development, and information systems to build them. This work is not simply designing visuals or coding features; it focuses on architecting the end-to-end experiences of the participants who will be using these systems. Thinking outside of a single use where people sit in one program all day long, experience architects look at how an individual component is part of a larger ecosystem. These ecosystems include multiple technologies, devices, websites, organizations, people, and events. Social web tool use—from including links to related material in retweets on Twitter to tagging people in Facebook photos to posting video responses in blog comments—clearly shows that participants are linking together multiple systems to forage for information and distribute knowledge. For humanists to have a stake in advancing these systems, they must be prepared to address issues of interface design, information architecture, findability, usability, and other experience concerns.

In my own work building digital products and services in industry and academia, I have hired many humanists to lead projects, act as information architects, and lead content development groups. We experience architects are already performing these roles on teams, buoyed by our humanities and social science backgrounds that have prepared us for understanding culture, use, and experience. Examining the case studies in this book moves the field and the industry one step further in pursuit of this goal and supports the existing work of information architects, information designers, and software developers.

Interdisciplinary Work

Architecting systems for the mediations among people, technologies, and groups demands perspectives from various backgrounds, educations, and disciplines. Such perspectives are even more vital as these systems permeate our social, business, and research lives. As mentioned earlier, this work lies both within the scope of what we are already doing in more traditional technical communication and across the broader groups of developers, designers, and architects. Working in teams to research, prototype, test, and deploy, these groups are in desperate need of more information on how to improve their products and services. Humanists are best located at the center of these movements because of their ability to understand users, manage projects, and work with diverse team members. We, as scholars, practitioners, and teachers, are trained to focus on persuasion, context, audience, and reception. Such training makes humanists uniquely situated for these kinds of interactions, and we must move from the sidelines to the center of these discussions.

Drawing on research found at the intersection of multiple disciplines—specifically technical and professional communication, participatory culture studies, and science and technology studies—we can trace how everyday people deploy technologies to communicate with each other. Tracing communication illustrates how architects can lead the analysis and design for both the social and technological infrastructures of communication by framing new practices, creating new tools, and enabling richer and more valuable interactions. Experience architects can trace these activities by championing participant-centered research methods and by becoming active participants in the communities for which they design. In doing so, they can practice the kind of holistic, context-rich experience architectures necessary to create systems that allow information to flow between people and technologies.

To build systems that serve the participants’ needs, experience architects need to hear from the users, participants, researchers, designers, developers, business analysts, and various other stakeholders. They also need to participate within these spaces as participants themselves. Such interaction is essential because stakeholders play a role in building the participant experience; their input is essential for ensuring appropriate, necessary interactions between participants and systems. Research teams need to develop shared perspectives that extend across humanities and sciences, industry and academia, and design and engineering. And experience architects, who straddle these diverse disciplines, are in the perfect position to organize—if not lead—the activities of such teams.

Moving across Boundaries

By integrating practices from both academia and industry that are active in mediated systems architecture, developers and designers move toward creating flexible systems that support people-powered solutions. In positioning our work at the intersection of systems design, technical communication, and digital culture, experience architects provide a newer and richer method for conceptualizing and creating mediated experiences for a range of users. Researchers and designers must embed themselves within social web activities in particular.

By embedding themselves within these scenarios, experience architects will understand the frustrations of participants who must negotiate often-broken systems and manipulate difficult-to-use tools in order to communicate as effectively as possible in a high-stakes situation. Going beyond observation, researchers and content developers must become these participants to understand how these mediations are succeeding and failing. By following hashtags, retweeting important news, adding tags to images, tracking missing persons through news reports, commenting on blogs, and witnessing how participants stretch social web systems in ways the authors never intended, experience architects gain an understanding that simple observation alone would never provide. Such insights lead to architecting the kinds of solutions that allow for quicker adoption of these tools when we need them most: the moments after a disaster occurs.

When using the term “architecture” in this book, I refer to the entire participant experience. I also refer to the information architecture that supports the data structures and naming conventions within networks (Morville and Rosenfeld 2006), the interaction design that structures the users’ flow of activity across these systems (Cooper, Reimann, and Cronin 2007), and the content strategy that organizes and presents relevant information for participants (Halvorson and Rach 2012; Redish 2007). All of these experience architecture issues are interdependent; no one problem can or should be isolated from the others. Many academic programs with this worldview have evolved so that industry will highly value their graduates.

For the theory and the practice of experience architecture to progress, processes and structures must be in place to support building for participatory exchange. For architects to help build such systems, they must reevaluate current software design paradigms with an eye toward building participatory experiences. In essence, we must rethink both the concepts of how people interact with systems and the perceptions of the designer’s place within these activities (Potts 2009b; Spinuzzi 2003).

The Social Web

Before I outline how to architect systems for the social web, we must examine how communication design practices need to shift to support participatory culture. In this section, I discuss these terms, define them as they relate to academia and industry practice, and explain why understanding these definitions is critical for project teams to work productively across disciplines. Using instances of disaster as a backdrop, I define these concepts in terms of a relevant, timely need.

We have an ethical, political, and philosophical obligation to equip current and future architects with methods that inform the research and design of systems that can help support the social web. This responsibility exists both for supporting everyday use of social web systems and for the high-stakes, high-pressure experiences that occur within disaster and crisis situations (Potts 2009a). This obligation exists for those who architect or have influence on the design of these systems, instruct others on how to build them, or research their development and social implications. To quote Sullivan (1990), we must “see ourselves as doing more than teaching a set of skills.” Our obligation “places ethical and political responsibility upon us” to answer this call with appropriate methods to address these situations (384). We must cease building antisocial software that works to instruct users on what they can and cannot do in these spaces in favor of building systems that are socially flexible, allowing participants to flourish.

Defining the Social

In considering this evolution, we need to look at the social web, which industry and academia have referred to as “social networking systems,” “social software,” and “social media,” depending on their perspectives and intentions. “Social networking systems” refers to the actual systems that allow people to form, join, and participate in networks such as Facebook. A term coined in 1987 (Drexler 1991) and made popular in the 2000s, “social software” refers to these tools as artifacts, noting their interfaces, interactions, and structures. “Social media” sometimes also describes these systems, but the term is also aligned with marketing campaigns and the rise of these tools as a media outlet. Various media outlets also refer to these technologies (somewhat tiringly) as “Web 2.0,” although the popular press more often uses the term “social media.”

In this book, I use these terms interchangeably when discussing internet-based networking systems that provide spaces for people to build communities, however temporary they might be. More specifically, I refer to these systems in general as the “social web,” sometimes specifically as “social web tools.” At first glance, this definition of social web seems broad. Yet, similar usage patterns of social sharing and knowledge exchange are apparent across a multitude of these sites. On instant messenger chat, participants can quickly exchange details one-to-one. On media-sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr, participants can post video feeds and photos of disaster tours and activism. On social networking sites such as Facebook, people can create groups based on disaster locations and events, as they did in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. On social blogging systems such as Tumblr, LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger, participants can collect information and write first-person accounts of the disasters. Using information-networking tools such as Twitter, knowledge workers around the globe can quickly exchange messages. On social knowledge repositories such as Wikinews and Wikipedia, participants can collect information and validate the content with what is appearing on other trusted sites. Lastly, but by no means exhaustively, collaborative writing spaces such as Google Docs allow participants to structure information and share writing tasks across networks.

Rather than studying or architecting for single, one-to-one actions between users and individual tools, I look at these participatory experiences holistically, taking into account actions made to share knowledge across multiple technologies. As Geisler (2011) states, “Twitter tools and Web-scale texts, on the other hand, provide more opportunities for readers and writers to become immersed in a virtual experience beyond what is familiar to them—not, however, to escape their embodied reality but to extend it” (253). Such immersion can lead to the kinds of products and services that are open to participation and engagement.

Within such context, architects must be active and participate in systems. To achieve this goal, architects must move away from the static notion of early web implementations to the interactive, social technologies that users demand. Building sites that allow participants to tag content with metadata, label information with relevant details, and reply to participants and developers is critical for such participation to take place. To recognize participants as stakeholders in the growth of these sites is key to forming spaces in which such activities can flow more freely. Blurring the lines between designer and participant, producer and audience, and writer and reader should be seen as opportunities to create technologies and policies that empower this level of engagement on all sides.

So much of our early research on social web tools looked at issues of community, identity, access, and refinement of definitions (Baym 2000; Doheny-Farina 1996; Donath 1999; Ess 1996; Gauntlett 2000; Herring 1993; S. Jones 1999; Rheingold 1993; Turkle 1995; Wellman 1997). In many of these articles, chapters, and reports, researchers focused on technologies such as email, chat, and online bulletin board systems because of the time period in which they were written. Research has shifted from looking solely at textual issues to looking at issues of interface, interaction, and architecture. More recent work has, in turn, looked at interaction design, media convergence, participation, and knowledge sharing, whether for work, entertainment, or other pursuits (Baym 2010; boyd 2007; Bruns 2008; Halavais 2009; Jenkins 2006; Potts 2010; Stolley 2009; van Dijck 2009). With 81...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Experience, Disaster, and the Social Web
• 2 Methods for Researching and Architecting the Social Web
• 3 Locating Data in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
• 4 Validating Information during the London Bombings
• 5 Transferring Knowledge during the Mumbai Attacks
• 6 Architecting Systems for Participation
• Appendix: The Noun Project Icons
• Notes
• References
• Index