How Information Flows During Emergencies

from The MIT Technology Review

Beijing Jiaotong University network scientist Liang Gao used mobile phone records to study human behavior during disasters and found that patterns of communication, and therefore information flows, change in significant ways.

Liang and colleagues studied the metadata from voice calls and texts of 10 million people over four years in an unidentified European country. The team identified emergencies that occurred in the region for the given time frame and then examined calls in the proximity of that time. The researchers studied people close enough to the emergency event to be directly influenced by it, as well as the group of people called by those directly involved.

Rather than calling others to spread the news of the emergency, the second group of people typically made their next call back to the person close to the emergency.

The team concludes that contrary to normal communication patterns, in an emergency the need to correspond with eyewitnesses is more critical than spreading situational awareness. The researchers say the findings reveal the way information spreads during unusual events and could impact authorities’ response to emergencies. Report

DCL: Its not clear to me that the conclusions are justified. They might depend upon the type of emergency.  The report says nothing about the problems of communication during emergencies such as natural disasters. In many types of natural disasters  communication networks are overloaded and call-backs are not possible.  However, this study might contain information about the kinds of event processing that goes on during emergencies.