Social media today is an integral part of our daily life, whether as citizens, researchers and even as first responders.
During the last 6 years, social media has been taking an ever increasing role as a main communication channel in emergency situations. Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management, and it becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organizations responding to a disaster.
Tomer Simon (pictured above), a PhD candidate in the Department of Emergency Medicine, supervised by Prof. Avishay Goldberg and Dr. Bruria Adini, has published a review article "Socializing in emergencies—A review of the use of social media in emergency situations" on the utilization of social media during emergencies by the general public and by the response organizations. The article was published in the prestigious magazine The International Journal of Information Management, and already has raised interest in a number of research centers worldwide. This is the first academic review article dealing with this evolving field.
In the article Simon presents that regardless of the type of emergency (a terror attack, a hurricane or an earthquake), communication infrastructure may be overloaded and collapse as numerous people attempt to use them to access information. However, it seems that social media, using internet infrastructure, is almost the only telecommunication infrastructure that survives, and the first to recover as seen in disasters that struck the world in recent years.
The public was the first to adopt social media in innovative and new ways for their various needs during emergencies. Emergency organizations have started using social media mainly as a response to the presence of the public in them. Simon presents that social media provides opportunities and possibilities to interact and engage with people during emergencies, by disseminating relevant information and gathering information that they publish.
Finally, Simon writes that although the public is exposed to large quantities of information without being aware of their validity or risk of misinformation, users are usually swift to correct misrepresentation, thus making the social media "self-regulating".
