humanitarian.info

The ConnectivIT lab at the University of Colorado has done some fascinating research in the last couple of years, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but never quite got round to. Such are the workings of the web that these things always come around if you wait long enough. So I’ll preface this blog entry by saying that their work is well worth reading, and that my beef is not with them but with media coverage of technology.

Their latest research, published in New Scientist magazine under Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you, suggests that Facebook “is more effective than the emergency services“. This is the sort of headline that makes newspapers and blogs in Magic Future Kingdom soil themselves with excitement, so it’s received wide coverage, which is good – more people interested in these issues means more visibility, more activity, more resources. Unfortunately the coverage in the Daily Telegraph shows the problem with this coverage:

Within just 90 minutes of the first deaths, however, a web page accurately describing the events appeared on web encyclopedia Wikipedia. Twenty minutes after that, Facebook users had set up a group called ‘I’m OK at VT’, which allowed students and staff to reassure the wider world that they were safe. A Facebook discussion was also begun which authoritatively listed the victims and whether people were feared dead rather than confirmed dead.

I’m fascinated to know how we judge the “accuracy” of the Wikipedia entry. Since Wikipedia policy is that nothing should be posted without a citation from a reliable external source, the “accuracy” of that entry must have been wholly dependent on – guess what? That’s right, reports from the media or emergency services. Check the wikipedia page if you want to see for yourself – and if there weren’t any citations, then how on earth can you tell if it’s accurate or not?

We can chalk these statements on journalistic shorthand. The real problem with this is that there is absolutely no accountability for Wikipedia, Facebook or other social media. If those reports weren’t accurate – if you went to Facebook, read that your son was dead and later found he was alive, for example – then that’s a lot of trauma that nobody will ever take responsibility for. For the emergency services, it’s a bit more serious than that – if they get it wrong, they get sued to oblivion, people lose their jobs and their credibility goes out of the window.

How do you know when somebody is dead in a situation like Virginia Tech? When they’re officially declared dead. Who officially declares them dead? A medical professional, a member of the emergency services. The idea that in Magic Future Kingdom we’ll just automatically know when somebody is dead is ludicrous – maybe their Twitter stream will stop or something?

The article does make good points, more rooted in the research. People on the ground are the source of a lot of information, and technology makes it easier for them to get that information out. It’s also likely that the more people you aggregate, the more accurate the information will be, which I think is Leysia Palen’s point about how these events show “socially produced accuracy”, i.e. a version of the wisdom of crowds. Yet there are limits to that accuracy, and there is a question about how useful that information in terms of actually dealing with the emergency – of which notifying relatives is only one small part. The need for a central authority that can route all this information is a foundational point of effective disaster management – so what are the implications of these developments for effective disaster management?

Sanjana also makes a point which I’d agree with entirely:

Of course, what it means is that Facebook, in the US, with reliable broadband wired and wireless coverage, with a ubiquity of PCs, where everyone speaks, reads and comprehends English, where Universities are well connected, where everyone has laptops and where everyone and their pet Chihuahua have a Facebook account, the platform can on occasion get more information out quicker than emergency services.

Time for us to shell out a few bucks for a New Scientist subscription and read the actual research article, rather than the press coverage. Plus, I need to get back on Medication 2.0 or something.