MobileActive.org

Opportunities for participation by members of the public are expanding the information arena of disaster. Social
media supports “backchannel” communications, allowing for wide-scale interaction that can be collectively
resourceful, self-policing, and generative of information that is otherwise hard to obtain. Results from our study of
information practices by members of the public during the October 2007 Southern California Wildfires suggest that
community information resources and other backchannel communications activity enabled by social media are gaining
prominence in the disaster arena, despite concern by officials about the legitimacy of information shared through such
means. We argue that these emergent uses of social media are pre-cursors of broader future changes to the institutional
and organizational arrangements of disaster response.