Social Positions and Collective Sense-Making in Crisis Communication

ABSTRACT

This article addresses how uncertainties during crisis situations evolve over time and how social positions dynamically affect the collective sense-making process in social media crisis communication. We carried out two case studies on Twitter: (1) the Brussels attacks (2016) with 4,390,784 tweets and (2) the Munich rampage (2016) with 1,258,227 tweets. By applying computed regression-based time-series analyses, we revealed the underlying tweet behavior. As next steps, we trained a machine learning algorithm to identify tweets that express uncertainty and we conducted social network analyses to determine the most influential actors and their social positions. The results reveal that tweet behavior in early crisis stages is dominated by information distribution and guided by content that is characterized by a high percentage of tweets expressing uncertainty. Based on our results, we identified two forms of collective sense-making: (1) acute and guided collective sense-making and (2) evaluative and retrospective collective sense-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective behaviour
• crisis management
• information systems
• sense-making
• social media

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefan Stieglitz

Stefan Stieglitz is Professor for Professional Communication in Electronic Media/Social Media at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His research is about social media usage and analytics. His work has been published in numerous reputable journals. In 2016, he was recognized with the ‘AIS Senior Scholars Best IS Publications Award”.

Milad Mirbabaie

Milad Mirbabaie is a research associate at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His research focuses on information systems, in particular on social media crisis communication. In 2017, he was recognized with the ‘Claudio Ciborra Award” at the 25th European Conference on Information Systems for the most innovative research article.

Maximilian Milde

Maximilian Milde graduated from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and holds a master’s degree in Applied Cognitive and Media Science. His studies were focused on human–computer interaction, social media for crisis management, and social media analytics.