Institutional vs. Non-institutional use of Social Media during Emergency Response: A Case of Twitter in 2014 Australian Bush Fire

Abstract

Social media plays a significant role in rapid propagation of information when disasters occur. Among the four phases of disaster management life cycle: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery, this paper focuses on the use of social media during the response phase. It empirically examines the use of microblogging platforms by Emergency Response Organisations (EROs) during extreme natural events, and distinguishes the use of Twitter by EROs from digital volunteers during a fire hazard occurred in Australia state of Victoria in early February 2014. We analysed 7,982 tweets on this event. While traditionally theories such as World System Theory and Institutional Theory focus on the role of powerful institutional information outlets, we found that platforms like Twitter challenge such notion by sharing the power between large institutional (e.g. EROs) and smaller non-institutional players (e.g. digital volunteers) in the dissemination of disaster information. Our results highlight that both large EROs and individual digital volunteers proactively used Twitter to disseminate and distribute fire related information. We also found that the contents of tweets were more informative than directive, and that while the total number of messages posted by top EROs were more than the non-institutional ones, whereas non-institutions exceeded on tweets and sharing of the tweets.

Disaster Management and Information Systems: Insights to Emerging Challenges

“…Indeed, their empirical evidence is consistent with the findings of Abedin and Babar (2018). They uncover various categories of external social media participants and identify their corresponding motivation and levels of reliability for disaster management.…”

“…Understanding these patterns is critical to unlock the SM potential in DM. The next three papers (Liu and Xu 2018;Abedin and Babar 2018;Ogie et al 2018) focus on SM and DM. The papers by Liu and Xu (2018) and by Abedin and Babar (2018) offer new theoretical insights and expose the limits of some existing IS theories.…”

“…The next three papers (Liu and Xu 2018;Abedin and Babar 2018;Ogie et al 2018) focus on SM and DM. The papers by Liu and Xu (2018) and by Abedin and Babar (2018) offer new theoretical insights and expose the limits of some existing IS theories. Whereas, the paper by Ogie et al (2018) analyses the impact of a rolled out IS application using SM in Jakarta to identify some interesting insights on various types of SM patterns that could point the way for developing new IS theories.…”

“…Paper 4 by Abedin and Babar (2018) examines the use of microblogging platforms by emergency response organisations. It highlights the potential use of Twitterand identifies a need for different theories to analyse the use of tweets from organisation users versus the usage of tweets from outside DM oganisational boundaries (e.g.…”

Editorial: Digital Transformation & Digital Business Strategy in Electronic Commerce - The Role of Organizational Capabilities

“…Past studies in the information systems and electronic commerce literature have already reported the influence of various isolated technical factors such as technology use [10], data integration [4], and type of digital technologies [1], [4] as well as non-technical factors like digital leadership [5] and human resource management, and business process management [17] on digital transformation of organizations. The next objective of this editorial emphasizes the importance of digital strategy and organizational capabilities in successful digital transformation of organizations.…”