This doctoral dissertation research, supported by the Science, Technology & Society program at NSF, examines the flows of information after disasters. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been presented as somewhat straightforward solutions to recent American disaster response failures because of the assumption that giving people a certain piece of information will necessarily result in a certain set of actions. This position fails to rigorously examine the socially situated nature of ICTs, and results in ineffective disaster responses that put people at risk.
The research will investigate situated information-related practices of early Internet users and Spanish-speakers in Northern California following the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. This research analyzes historical data from diverse archival sources such as online mailing lists, oral histories, surveys, interviews, media diary studies, newspaper archives, maps, and government reports, as well as present day interviews. By revisiting a 1989 disaster twenty years later, this work will also investigate if information practices are more enduring than the latest technology available. The research focuses on three key ICT-related information practices that this work argues are general post-disaster actions: people notify others of their personal well-being; people and organizations try to gain awareness of the situation as it develops; and organizations inform others about resource needs and availability. Analyzing these ICT-related practices after a major natural disaster will help this dissertation contribute to social science literatures on information, technology, and risk by conceptualizing how formal and informal social structures shape post-disaster ICT use. A more nuanced understanding of information practices following a disaster has important implications for government policies on information technology for disaster response, as well as for information system design in commercial spaces.
