In our interconnected world, social media is a vital tool for communication in the everyday life of individuals. The importance of social media in society has increased not only in times of peace, but social media has grown to be instrument of influencing crisis. In recent years, social media’s role in crisis and crisis response was observed by many scholars for different crisis. One of the most recent ones is the water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, which was chosen as a case study due to its current relevance in the social media landscape. The obviously high use of social in this crisis is what this qualitative desk study investigates. This study does, however, not aim to analyse social media as a solution for a crisis, but sheds light on the patterns of social media behaviour. This research thus aims to understand Why people turn to social media in a crisis? Subsequent to this, this research analyses whether different types of users resort to social media during a crisis for different reasons. The results were obtained through applying a frameworks: As the main tool of analysis, the Different Users and Usage Framework by Houston et al. (2015). Assisting on explaining some specific part of the findings, the Theory of Planned Behavior (Icek Ajzen, 1991) was applied. Three main findings were analysed for the case study: (1) People turn to social media during a crisis for different reasons and in the case of the water crisis in South Africa, fifteen usage areas were observed. (2) According to the analytical results, different users tend to dominate different usage areas and (3) During the Cape Town crisis, it was common practice for businesses and corporations to raise awareness and combine it with promoting their business.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第18408号 / 情博第523号 / 新制||情||92(附属図書館) / 31266 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 多々納 裕一, 教授 石田 亨, 准教授 畑山 満則 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

As the world gets more exposed to natural hazards, new practices of response to crisis have become a topic that requires innovation. FindMe Tag is a device designed in partnership with Frog and Sony that provides rescue teams with information on victims’ locations and their medical conditions. This data is used to facilitate the stages of reconnaissance and triage by quickly hierarchizing tactical priorities and areas of intervention.  Through this design practice, we proposed to mitigate the impact of hurricanes and tropical storms in low-income countries by addressing issues that search and rescue missions undertake to locate and prioritize victims. The outcome of this project, apart from the FindMe Tag device, was a digital interface for rescuers and citizens to receive and communicate different information.  In this design research, I will present some consequences and opportunities of this technological development. The proposed interface designs centred on the usage of different communication patterns to balance aspects of transparency and surveillance that affect differently the stakeholders involved in crisis response. Rather than using technologies to surveil citizens and share this information with authorities, the outcome of this research focused on providing both users with awareness and agency over the information they are sharing and receiving.

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This diploma thesis deals with the use of canistherapy in the special education practise. It records the development, methods, forms and type sof canistherapy, included risks and benefits of this psychoterapeutic method. The research parts maps the relationship between the education of dog handlers and the quality of their fieldwork.

Abstract Title: It’s not just a comment – a study about Crisis Management on Social Media Author: Malin Pettersson 910624 and Amanda White 920310 Year: Spring 2014 Level: Bachelor degree Department: School of Business and Economics Supervisor: Carina Holmgren Examiner: Frederic Bill   Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical model for Crisis Management on social media.   Method: The overall literature that was found consisted of traditional Crisis Management and the communication that goes with it, and it was mainly written for traditional channels such as newspapers. The theories could not concretely describe how organizations should handle crisis in Social Media. Therefore, this study focuses on if and how organizations can use the traditional theories when working with crisis management in social media. Through a qualitative method the study has examined and tested the model on three crises, and subsequently improved the model based on the empirical material and  the analysis that was made.   Conclusion: The conclusion found that organizations need to adjust their crisis management after following guidelines for it to work on social media: -    Strategies should be limited to only one, and be either a rebuilding strategy or a bolstering strategy. -    The focus should be on emotional communication, and regarding the rational aspects the focus should be on actual actions and plans for the future. -    Clear guidelines for what type of questions and critics that should be answered should be set. Due to time restrictions questions and critics that communicate direct attacks and/or has playful undertones should be filtered out. -    Spokespersons can be many, which amplifies the need of clear guidelines and a coherent choice of strategy. Further, the messages should all be signed the same regardless of its creator. A good choice is therefore to sign it with the organizations name. -    Social media demands constant presence as the organizations must answer comments quickly, preferably within the hour of their publication. They must also quickly share information to make sure they are first with defining the crisis events. Furthermore, organizations should be active on all the social media channels where they have an account to avoid creating a forum for only speculations, rumors and discussions between stakeholders. -    Authorities should not stand alone in the spotlight, and they should not act alone on the organizations social media channels. Keywords: Crisis Management, Crisis Communication, Crisis Response, Response stage, Social Media, Preventable Crisis, Findus, Max, Parken Zoo.

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No description available.

As the amount of computer mediated information (e.g., emails, documents, multi-media) we need to process grows, our need to rapidly sort, organize and store electronic information likewise increases. In order to store information effectively, we must find ways to sort through it and organize it in a manner that facilitates efficient retrieval. The instantaneous and emergent nature of communications across networks like Twitter makes them suitable for discussing events (e.g., natural disasters) that are amorphous and prone to rapid changes. It can be difficult for an individual human to filter through and organize the large amounts of information that can pass through these types of social networks when events are unfolding rapidly. A common feature of social networks is the images (e.g., human faces, inanimate objects) that are often used by those who send messages across these networks. Humans have a particularly strong ability to recognize and differentiate between human Faces. This effect may also extend to recalling information associated with each human Face. This study investigated the difference between human Face images, non-human Face images and alphanumeric labels as retrieval cues under different levels of Task Load. Participants were required to recall key pieces of event information as they emerged from a Twitter-style message feed during a simulated natural disaster. A counter-balanced within-subjects design was used for this experiment. Participants were exposed to low, medium and high Task Load while responding to five different types of recall cues: (1) Nickname, (2) Non-Face, (3) Non-Face & Nickname, (4) Face and (5) Face & Nickname. The task required participants to organize information regarding emergencies (e.g., car accidents) from a Twitter-style message feed. The messages reported various events such as fires occurring around a fictional city. Each message was associated with a different recall cue type, depending on the experimental condition. Following the task, participants were asked to recall the information associated with one of the cues they worked with during the task. Results indicate that under medium and high Task Load, both Non-Face and Face retrieval cues increased recall performance over Nickname alone with Non-Faces resulting in the highest mean recall scores. When comparing medium to high Task Load: Face & Nickname and Non-Face significantly outperformed the Face condition. The performance in Non-Face & Nickname was significantly better than Face & Nickname. No significant difference was found between Non-Faces and Non-Faces & Nickname. Subjective Task Load scores indicate that participants experienced lower mental workload when using Non-Face cues than using Nickname or Face cues. Generally, these results indicate that under medium and high Task Load levels, images outperformed alphanumeric nicknames, Non-Face images outperformed Face images, and combining alphanumeric nicknames with images may have offered a significant performance advantage only when the image is that of a Face. Both theoretical and practical design implications are provided from these findings.