'Breaking' news: uncovering sense-breaking patterns in social media crisis communication during the 2017 Manchester bombing
Individuals, (media-) organisations, and crisis responders who are involved in ad hoc crisis communication steadily deploy social media to contribute to collective sense-making as an endeavour to create meaning in highly uncertain situations. Exerting sense-giving in order to shape others' conc...
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| Published in: | Behaviour & information technology 2020-03, Vol.39 (3), p.252-266 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
| Tags: | Add Tag |
| Summary: | Individuals, (media-) organisations, and crisis responders who are involved in ad hoc crisis communication steadily deploy social media to contribute to collective sense-making as an endeavour to create meaning in highly uncertain situations. Exerting sense-giving in order to shape others' conceptions is causally preceded by an initial breakup of existing understanding. This study aims to explore patterns of sense-breaking in social media crisis communication and its impact on collective sense-making and sense-giving. To this end, we conducted a case study of the Manchester bombing in 2017, including a social network analysis of 708,147 Twitter postings and a content analysis of 2006 original tweets. We found individual role types to be initiators of sense-breaking in early crisis stages when uncertainty is at its height. Exerting successive sense-giving becomes more challenging if the collective sense-making has progressed along with the sequence of events. This understanding aims to encourage emergency management organisations to move their sense-giving actions closer to the point in time when sense-breaking occurs. |
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| ISSN: | 0144-929X 1362-3001 |