New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts

The Role of Information and Social Networks - The theme of the report is the tension between the potential benefits to humanitarian efforts from harnessing new communication technologies and the risks they pose to relief efforts and media coverage.  The report examines how authorities and humanitarian aid organizations can best balance the opportunities and challenges of exploiting different technologies at key stages on the timeline of crisis.  These key stages include: early warning and preparedness, immediate humanitarian relief, and reconstruction and long-term development.

The report begins by citing the example of the 2009 political protests in Iran.  On June 13th 2009, thousands of Iranians protested against what they felt was a flawed election.  The Iranian regime in power attempted to suffocate any opposing information by restricting internet access and by not allowing journalists to cover the protests.  Texting, Twitter and Facebook became vital in keeping the protests organized and spreading the happenings to foreign media.  In fact the US Government actually had twitter reschedule a network upgrade.  that would've shut the site down for a few hours.  There were little checks and balances to the information coming out of Iran and both both hoaxers and Iranian government took advantage of that by posting false information.   The event was dubbed "Twitter in Tehran" and it demonstrated both the opportunities and challenges of having these communication technologies readily available.  Unfortunately false information did spread and receive attention but just as importantly true information was allowed to do the same and it created global awareness to the events.

Recently there is a trend that proves Humanitarian crisis is on the rise.  Human attacks such as terrorism and natural disasters caused from climate change are the main culprits.  The impact of these crisis is most felt on the least developed countries.  These countries also have the weakest communication infrastructure and this poses significant problems to governments and aid agencies looking to help.  During a crisis there must be a an early warning response and it needs to be one-way communication that is quick and accurate.  During the warning response and beyond information flows must be two-way to be effective.  With cell phones and Twitter/Facebook, information from the external world to the affected and from affected to agencies that want to help is readily available and must be utilized.  For this information to help helpful it must be accurate and trusted, thus authentication is a key challenge.  To improve two-way accuracy developed and underdeveloped countries must be educated on the proper usage of social networks.       

Social Media aids humanitarian efforts and causes divergent coverage of Japan Quake

How social media is helping -The role of social media during international and national disasters is now widely acknowledged globally and the result is social media being placed highly on crisis communication agendas.  During the earthquake crisis in Japan social media has helped three distinct groups.  First there are the victims of the earthquake.  US Google Developer created Person Finder for families looking to discover the whereabouts of friends and family.  It was created after the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and is now helping those affected in Japan.  At last count, Person Finder contains 306,600 names and has been instrumental in helping victims.  News Outlets have tapped into social media to improve their coverage of natural disasters such as the earthquake in Japan.  In Japan traditional methods of communication (television, telephone lines, radio etc.) were lost immediately after the earthquake but social media wasn't affected.  Only an hour after the earthquake tweets coming out of Tokyo reached 1,2000 a minute.  Just a few hours after tags like prayforJapan and earthquake were tweeted thousdands of times a second.  Twitter gave victims a voice to be heard – news stations like CNN utilized user-generated information like images and accounts from ground-zero to raise awareness of the crisis.  Finally there is the Relief Aid.  With such a large scale disaster, getting charitable donations and relief aid to affected areas is critical, costly and difficult.  With the help of Twitter, Facebook and text messaging, Relief Aid foundations are able to raise awareness rapidly and make it easier for people to make donations.
How social media has been disruptive - There is a stark contrast between the way in which foreign and Japanese media have covered the earthquake.  Western Media has focused on the nuke scare and has been running sensationalistic headlines.  This, and the fear of the unknown, has lead to foreigners in Japan receiving phone calls from family and friends pleading with them to leave Japan.  That differs from the way Japanese media is covering the situation and actual gravity of the situation.  Most Japanese citizens are going about their daily lives and routines as normal.  Most children are back in school and playing outside.  Most businesses have resumed operations.  Many attribute this gap in attitude to the differing information people are receiving from their media sources.  Hiroshi Ishikawa, the general manager of the National Press Club in Japan says that "deep down, the Japanese media has a view that the situation will be resolved but that the foreign media is portraying the situation as getting out of control."