'facebooking' towards crisis recovery and beyond

Abstract

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of Facebook use amongst a population living through ongoing disruption. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens, as well as received survey responses from 218 individuals, who have been experiencing the current Gulf War since March 2003. We show how people in a society experiencing conflict use Facebook in ways that are different to uses in non-war societies. We find that Facebook supports people living in crisis environments at two levels. First, Facebook aids people directly to recover from disruption. People used Facebook to create "safe lists", to seek help and provide assistance, and to re-construct their social scaffolding. But at a deeper level, citizens also used Facebook to maintain and develop new social norms, and to re-direct their country. We discuss how disruption can serve as an opportunity by which people can re-invent their societies and how our understandings of Facebook should evolve.

The new war correspondents

“…However, in war zones, PIOs are weakened by conflict and are unable or unwilling to carry out their role. In such situations, government information is often unreliable [34]. As we will describe, this is the context in Mexico as the Drug War persists.…”

“…They even changed socialization practices, such as finding marriage partners [29]. Drawing on Powell's model of crises [30], Seeman and Mark [34] describe how people use social media differently depending on where they are in the crisis; they point out that war presents a special case for crisis informatics because people are experiencing several stages concurrently and, thus, using social media to serve different needs.…”

Rethinking civic computing in China

“…Semaan and Mark's qualitative study of Facebook use 13 among Iraqi citizens experiencing the Gulf War reported that people used Facebook to reconstruct social networks and develop new social practices (Semaan & Mark, 2012). …”

“…Previous HCI research on social media has shown how ordinary citizens utilized digital technologies to help both the self and others navigate through difficult situations, such as wartime, political unrest, and natural disasters (Mark & Semaan, 2008;Al-Ani et al, 2012;Semaan & Mark, 2012;De Choudhury et al, 2014). For example, Al-Ani et al…”

“…During the Gulf War, Iraqi citizens used Facebook to keep track of their friends and family, help each other, and find ways to improve their country (Semaan & Mark, 2012). During the Mexican Drug War, individuals used social media to aggregate and disseminate information to large numbers of people (Monroy-Hernández et al, 2013).…”