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This past week, I had the chance to read a very interesting article by a professor here in the college of IST. It provides an overview of microblogging and its usage by emergency relief organizations, the main benefits being its ubiquity and rapid availability but having issues of reliability and level of detail [1]. I thought this was an interesting topic, and wanted to write a brief summary to share it.

The authors explore benefits and disadvantages in the usage of Twitter during crisis. They observe that complete knowledge of a situation is utopic and thus lack of reliability does not necessarily have a great negative impact. On the other hand, there’s still a feeling that people and information should be vetted, despite the altruistic nature of the Twitter community [1]. An interesting parallelism to draw would be that involving threatening tweets. Why is there a common agreement that, in a shooter threat for example, there’s an immediate deployment in response, whereas there’s more hesitation in providing the same response for emergency response? Both involve saving people’s lives, and both have logistical costs. Furthermore, there’s even a term for pranking SWAT teams (i.e. “swatting”) because of its common occurrence, while pranking humanitarian organizations is almost unheard of.

To gain a better understanding of the usage of Twitter from the perspective of these organizations, the authors conducted 21 interviews with individuals from disaster response organizations (one interview per organization) [1]. The authors found that often times there’s different sources of data quality and microblogging is one more contextual source, with varying levels of data quality. Furthermore, the authors found that the general sentiment towards Twitter was positive and many respondents claimed that there was great value in having an early alert [1].

Finally, disaster response organizations in this study commented on the usage of third-parties for information verification and analysis. The author mentions the reduced cost of this strategy and also mentions the existence of volunteer technical communities (e.g. Ushahidi) to aid in the endeavors of these organizations [1]. Again, supporting Guillemette et al.’s theory, we can observe that these organizations have placed a greater focus on IT and have found ways to develop information channels that would aid them in their mission (e.g. collaborating with volunteer communities, relying on microblogging, creating a network of information with people in the same field), all of them considerably more intricate than the adoption of CCTs [1]. It seems that the only difference between one and the other is the perception of IT’s centrality, because where there’s will, there’s a way.

References

[1] Tapia, A.H. et al. 2013. Beyond the Trustworthy Tweet: A Deeper Understanding of Microblogged Data Use by Disaster Response and Humanitarian Relief Organizations. (2013).