New Media in Times of Crisis

New Media in Times of Crisis provides an interdisciplinary look at research focused around how people organize during crises. Contributors examine the latest practices for communicating during crises, including evacuation practices, workplace safety challenges, crisis social media usage, and strategies for making emergency alerts on U.S. mobile phones constructive and helpful. The book is grounded in the practices of first responders, crisis communicators, people experiencing tragic events, and communities who organize on- and offline to make sense of their experiences. The authors draw upon a wide range of theories and frameworks with the goal of establishing new directions for research and practice. The text is suitable for advanced students and researchers in crisis, disaster, and emergency communication.

Introduction Section I: Focusing on Crisis Responders 1. Organizational Crisis Communication in the Age of Social Media: Weaving a Practitioner Perspective into Theoretical Understanding 2. This Is Getting Bad: Embodied Sensemaking about Hazards When Business-as-Usual Turns into an Emergency 3. The Cultivation of Shared Resources for Crisis Response in Multiteam Systems Section II: How individuals Seek, Share, and Get Messages 4. Identifying Communicative Processes Influencing Risk-Information Seeking at Work: A Research Agenda 5. Trouble at 30,000 Feet: Twitter Response to United Airlines’ PR Crises 6. Mobile Crisis Communication: Temporality, Rhetoric, and the Case of Wireless Emergency Alerts 7. Transportation Network Issues in Evacuations Section III: Opportunities for New Forms of Organizing during Times of Crisis 8. Community Resilience and Social Media: A Primer on Opportunities to Foster Collective Adaptation Using New Technologies 9. Site-Seeing in Disaster: Revisiting Online Social Convergence a Decade Later 10. Dormant Disaster Organizing and the Role of Social Media 11. Conclusionsand Future Interdisciplinary Opportunities

Keri K. Stephens is an Associate Professor in the Moody College of Communication, and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests bring an organizational perspective to understanding how people interact with communication technologies. She has more than 60 peer-reviewed publications, including a recent book Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication.