Tweeting under fire: disaster researcher Jeannette Sutton explores how ordinary people create their own media during crises.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Jeannette Sutton - Interview

WHEN WILDFIRES swept through Southern California in October and November 2007, everyone with a home near the fire line was desperate for information. But the traditional means of finding time-sensitive news were flawed.

After the crisis, when a trio of disaster researchers asked residents how they felt about mainstream news coverage, the investigators heard complaints that "the information was insufficient, either because it lacked specificity to their area; was biased towards metropolitan areas; seemed focused on the sensational at the expense of those in rural or outlying areas; or was simply inaccurate." And the government? Sometimes it did a good job of getting breaking news to the public, but other times its outlets were "slow to update information to at-risk and evacuated communities or simply overwhelmed and stymied by on-line traffic."

Fortunately, there were alternatives. As one interviewee told the researchers, "the only way we all have to get good information here is for those who have it to share it. We relied on others to give us updates when they had info and we do the same for others." That meant going online, to community forums such as RimOfTheWorld.net and SoCalMountains.com: quick, constantly updated efforts fueled by voluntary, amateur action. Earlier fires, another resident explained, had taught the locals that "there is no 'they.' 'They' won't tell us if there is danger, 'they' aren't coming to help, and 'they' won't correct bad information. We have to do that amongst ourselves."

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These do-it-yourselfers were enormously successful. By the end of the crisis, professional reporters and professional emergency workers alike were relying on RimOfTheWorld.net for the most up-to-date information. It was a bracing lesson not just for anyone who assumes that ordinary people are helpless in the face of disaster but for anyone who doubts that DIY media can ever out-perform the mainstream press.

The lead author of the disaster researchers' paper is Jeannette Sutton, 38, a sociologist at the University of Colorado's Natural Hazards Center. Sutton, 38, is no stranger to catastrophe. Not long after graduating from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996, she worked with trauma patients as a hospital chaplain. After helping coordinate victim response efforts to the shootings at Columbine High School, it was a natural progression for her to work "in a much larger context but with a similar population: people who were affected by events that disrupted their lives" Sutton went on to earn her doctorate in sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she became part of a small, interdisciplinary group of scholars investigating the ways ordinary people use new media during crises. The tools in question range from Facebook to Flickr to Twitter to blogs--any technology that allows people to communicate and collaborate.

"Social media support social networking," Sutton says. "It's open. Lots of people can participate. Wisdom is driven up from the bottom. It's not experts saying this is what it is, it's people collaborating at a grassroots level."

Managing Editor Jesse Walker spoke with Sutton via phone in May.

reason: One of your papers contrasts "front channel" and "back channel" communications during a disaster. How do the two channels view each other?

Sutton: The front channel is the official communication from public officials. They tend to rely on the major media to push information out to the public. The back channel is the unofficial communication that's going on behind the scenes between members of the public. Public officials tend to view back-channel communications with great skepticism. It's not controlled, it's perceived as being disorganized, and there's the potential for misinformation.

Where people use social media to communicate with one another, they're doing so partly because the information they're seeing and hearing...