Disasters
The article by Sabrina McCormick (2015) focuses on the role and responsibility of emergency managers in using social media for formal response in case of a disaster. The article also gives detailed insights about crowdsourcing for emergency managers in disaster preparedness as well as response and recovery in the US. Different emergency managers from across the country are usually scheduled for qualitative interviews on the Eastern seaboard. This is a new way of ensuring that the emergency managers are up-to-date with the current emergency management tools. Emergency management tools are in a state of transition in this current era; we are transitioning from the formal internally regulated tools to the more modern crowdsourcing and social media tools.
Some of the main sources of challenges that were identified in incorporating these new emergency management tools were either internal or external. The internal challenges resulted from policies, staffing, and internal structures in the emergency agencies that might otherwise use social media. The external challenges, in the other hand, were derived from the weak interactions that many emergency managers have with the external sources of news and information on emergency cases. The article goes further to provide some useful insights on why many emergency managers reluctant when it comes to using social media, and describes their varied concerns of uncertainty, fear, and doubt. The research was done majorly to find out the dynamics of the transition in emergency management and offered the much required lessons for how to effectively improve its results. These results, or rather outcomes, are critical issues to the citizens of the country because you never know when disaster might strike next. All in all, this article demonstrates how there are a number of institutional policies that cause barriers to the effective use of the new tools and how they can be dealt with.
References
McCormick, S. (2015). New tools for emergency managers: an assessment of obstacles to use and implementation. Disasters, 40(2), 207-225. doi:10.1111/disa.12141
