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Digital commemoration: surveying the social media revival of historical crises

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Social media has facilitated coordination efforts to help save lives, but are people using social media after the emergency phase? To answer this question, the author conducted a study surveying the social media revival of 111 crisis events that occurred over the past 50 years to examine if social media is being used to commemorate historical crises. Quantitative and qualitative social media metrics on each event were collected to determine their social media presence. The findings show that people are using social media to sustain the living record of past crises as an attempt to prevent disasters and strengthen resilience to future crises. Technological and social hazards that occurred before the social media age tended to exhibit a higher social media presence than natural hazards. Also, the revival of past crises typically occurred when they were linked to recent crises that exhibited similar causes, effects, and vulnerabilities. Issues in the construction and implementation of the survey inform the development of sociotechnical systems designed to collect, manage, and analyze historical events through the cyberinfrastructure.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '11: CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2011
    2554 pages
    ISBN:9781450302685
    DOI:10.1145/1979742

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 07 May 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. commemoration
    2. crisis informatics
    3. cyberinfrastructure
    4. social media
    5. survey
    6. web sphere

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