How do social media affect people’s compassion and civic action? The case of the Sewol Ferry disaster in Korea

ABSTRACT

The purposes of the current study were to examine the effects of social media use on facilitating compassion and civic actions regarding the Sewol Ferry disaster in Korea and mitigating compassion fatigue compared with the uses of traditional media, and to investigate whether the link between compassion (and compassion fatigue) and civic action would be moderated by social media use. With online survey data (n = 717) collected in 2017, we found that (1) social media users experienced less compassion fatigue than other media users for news about the disaster: (2) there was no difference in compassion among the different media use groups; and (3) social media users were more likely to participate in disaster-related civic actions than were network TV users and newspaper users; (4) we did not find a moderation effect of social media use between compassion (and compassion fatigue) and civic actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• civic action
• compassion
• compassion fatigue
• disaster news

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Only the completion rate was reported as Callegaro and DiSogra (2008) suggested that for studies using volunteer opt-in panels, completion rate is the single most useful metric.[open-strick].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeehyun Kim

Jeehyun Kim (Ph.D., Yonsei University) is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Communication Research at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research areas include health communication, journalism, and media effects.

Yong-Chan Kim

Yong-Chan Kim (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is a Professor at the Department of Communication at Yonsei University. His research program has been built around three key areas: urban communication, new media technology, and public health/risk. His most recent books include “The candlelight movement, democracy, and communication in Korea“ (2021, Routledge) “The communication ecology of 21st century urban communities” (2018, Peter Lang) and “Media and community” (2018, Culture Look).

Ahra Cho

Ahra Cho (Ph.D., Yonsei University) is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Communication Research at Yonsei University. Her research interests focus on the influences of new media on civic engagement and tolerance.

Euikyung Shin

Euikyung Shin (Ph.D., Yonsei University) is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Communication Research at Yonsei University. Her research interests include digital media use and communication at urban settings.

Yeji Kwon

Yeji Kwon (Ph.D., Sogang University) is a Research Fellow in the Media and Advertising Research Institute at the Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO) in South Korea. Her research focuses on issues related to media influences on children and older adults, media literacy, media impacts on interpersonal relationships, civil society, and consumer markets.