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ABSTRACT
Individuals, (media-) organisations, and crisis responders who are involved in ad hoc crisis communication steadily deploy social media to contribute to collective sense-making as an endeavour to create meaning in highly uncertain situations. Exerting sense-giving in order to shape others’ conceptions is causally preceded by an initial breakup of existing understanding. This study aims to explore patterns of sense-breaking in social media crisis communication and its impact on collective sense-making and sense-giving. To this end, we conducted a case study of the Manchester bombing in 2017, including a social network analysis of 708,147 Twitter postings and a content analysis of 2006 original tweets. We found individual role types to be initiators of sense-breaking in early crisis stages when uncertainty is at its height. Exerting successive sense-giving becomes more challenging if the collective sense-making has progressed along with the sequence of events. This understanding aims to encourage emergency management organisations to move their sense-giving actions closer to the point in time when sense-breaking occurs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 https://gephi.org, last accessed on 19 February 2019.
2 https://www.tableau.com, last accessed on 19 February 2019.
3 Gephi offers an interface to visualise network structures. In this case, each retweet author and each retweet in our dataset was appointed a unique ID. To create a weighted retweet network, we processed our data so that each ID of a retweet author points toward the user that originally authored the tweet. Consequently, the tool displays each user as a node and each retweet as an edge, which can be graphically modified.