Social Media in Disaster Response (ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication)

Social Media in Disaster Response (ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication)

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. "Disasters are now, more than ever before, collective experiences we share via the social media that now pervades our lives. In this book, Liza Potts examines how ordinary people use social media to respond to disaster. By applying actor-network theory to several cases of disaster experiences, she develops concepts for understanding them, tools for analyzing them, and a pathway for future research." - Clay Spinuzzi, Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin "I have been watching the work Liza Potts captures in this book for a number of years for one simple reason: she has been mapping the future of how to understand and design communication tools. Designing participatory systems that facilitate access, engagement, power--even happiness--is a necessary goal, and this book will help us move closer to it." - Jeffrey Grabill, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Michigan State University "... Social Media in Disaster Response defines a new profession in social web design, the experience architect, a specialized hybrid of humanist and technologist steeped in the culture of the social web who can design systems from the inside out. Overall, Potts has succeeded in producing a solid text in its application of theory and a thought-provoking read." - Dave Yeats, UX Researcher, Bazaarvoice, Austin, Texas Liza Potts is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. She is the Director of WIDE Research and a Co-Founder of the Experience Architecture undergraduate degree program. Her research interests include digital rhetoric, user experience, and participatory culture. Dr. Potts is the Past Chair of the Association for Computer Machinery's Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (ACM: SIGDOC) and part of the leadership steering committee for Women in Technical Communication. She has worked for Microsoft, consultancies, and start-ups as a director, user researcher, information architect, and program manager.