Mapping Online Publics

It’s difficult to believe that one year ago, significant parts of Brisbane were inundated by floodwaters; thankfully, there has been no repeat of the flood crisis this year. One of the few good news stories to emerge from the disaster was the – overall, very successful – way in which social media such as Twitter and Facebook were used during the event, both by key emergency authorities and by everyday users, from directly affected local residents to onlookers further afield.

Particular kudos in this must go to the Queensland Police Service Media Unit, which – not quite from a standing start, but certainly without much time to prepare a comprehensive strategy for its social media crisis communication approaches – delivered timely, informative, and level-headed updates on the flood crisis as it unfolded. Its Facebook followers grew, literally overnight, by a factor of ten, and @QPSMedia also became the single most visible account participating in the #qldfloods Twitter hashtag.

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Some welcome validation of our efforts to understand the use of social media – especially Twitter – during recent natural disasters (a few key posts are collected here) has arrived in the form of a number of submissions to the Australian federal government’s Convergence Review. The Review has the (very broad) remit to “to examine the policy and regulatory frameworks that apply to the converged media and communications landscape in Australia”, an important task not least also against the backdrop of the emerging National Broadband Network and the continuing concerns over highly concentrated ownership structures in Australia’s commercial media industries.

Social media are far from playing a central role in these overall considerations, of course, but their increasing significance as an additional medium for many-to-many communication alongside more established mainstream media is being highlighted by a number of the submissions. Our work is being cited especially by two key submissions.

The first of these is from ex-monopolist telecommunications provider Telstra. It highlights the increased agency of users as content creators, drawing inter alia on my Gatewatching book and my two reports on social media (with Mark Bahnisch) for the Smart Services CRC, and particularly notes the role of user-generated content during the Queensland floods, citing material we published on the CCI Website:

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As we’ve mentioned in a previous post, Jean and I participated in the Eidos Institute symposium “Social Media in Times of Crisis” at the State Library of Queensland today – which turned out to be a great event that generated lots of new ideas and further possibilities for our research. Many thanks to all of you who came along, and especially to our fellow presenters, and the Eidos team for organising the event.

The whole symposium was recorded and will, I think, be made available soon on the Eidos Website; for now, here’s our own presentation, with audio:

Update: added another graph showing the total number of tweets from leading accounts.

Queensland has just experienced a once-in-decades flood event, with the capital Brisbane (where we’re based) hit especially hard. Social media like Twitter and Facebook played an important role in getting information out and organising rescue, relief, and recovery operations.

We’ll have a much closer look at the role of these platforms during the height of the crisis at a later stage, when we find the time – for now, I wanted to post a quick overview of the level of Twitter activity at least. This graph shows tweets using the #qldflood(s) hashtags between 11 and 14 January 2011 (retrieved via Twapperkeeper):

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