Social Media Use in Crisis and Recovery

Speaker
Gloria Mark
Professor, Department of Informatics, University of California Irvine

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Environmental crises such as natural disasters or wars can have highly disruptive long-term effects on people’s lives. The Internet, and social media in particular, provide opportunities not only for citizens to engage in recovery from a crisis but also for researchers to use large-scale citizen-generated data to analyze crises. In this talk I will first present how Internet and mobile technologies played a major role in enabling citizens in Iraq and Israel to be resilient during recent wars. Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of interviews, blogs, Facebook and Internet archival data, I will discuss properties of resilience that these technologies enable, such as reconfiguring social networks, negotiating travel and repairing trust in information. In most cases, citizens developed a higher reliance on virtual work and interaction and in some cases this led to deeper structural changes. Second, I will also show how the blogosphere “mirrors” external events during a societal crisis. Based on text analysis from the Iraqi and Egyptian blogospheres, we found that the blogosphere can fairly accurately indicate external events of a crisis: the severity of the war in Iraq, and the revolution in Egypt in 2011. I will describe broader implications for how social media can support people in being resilient when their society experiences disruption.

Speaker's Bio

Gloria Mark is Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on technology use to support collaboration. Her current projects include studying citizen use of social media for resilience in crises, and multitasking and technology use. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to joining UCI in 2000, she worked at the GMD in Bonn, Germany (now Fraunhofer Institute). In 2006 she received a Fulbright scholarship where she worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of HCI and CSCW. She was the program chair for the ACM CSCW'12, ACM CSCW'06, and ACM GROUP'05 conferences. She is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, and the CSCW journal. Her work has been featured in the popular press such as The New York Times, Wall St. Journal, and Time magazine.

Speaker's Website
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/

Host
Robert Kraut