This 21st century is totally working on only one platform i.e. Social Media. Social Media is one of the main medium which everyone in the world is using for lot of purposes. Earlier there was no strong media as we are having now. People would suffer a lot without knowing the things going on around the world.
Social media has great impact on emergency rescue operations as provides the information to interact with people and share that information. “Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management, and it becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organisations responding to a disaster,” said Tomer Simon from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel.
Mainly Social Media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are sometimes the only communication medium that provides, survives and the first to recover as seen in disasters that struck the world in recent years. “Emergency organisations have only started using social media mainly as a response to the presence of the public in them,” Simon said.
Emergency managers who were formerly used to one-directional distribution of information to the population are now exposed to vast amounts of information, originating from the public and typically before formal notifications. People are the first to adopt Social Media in innovative ways for their individual various needs in emergency.
“In an emergency, the public is exposed to large quantities of information without being aware of its validity or risk of misinformation. However users are typically quick to correct misrepresentation thus making social media ‘self-regulating’,” Simon said. This was published in the International Journal of Information Management.