Tweeting an Ethos: Emergency Messaging, Social Media, and Teaching Technical Communication

Abstract

The expanding use of social media such as Twitter has raised the stakes for teaching our students about individual and organizational ethoi. This article considers the role of organizations' Twitter feeds during emergency situations, particularly Hurricane Irene in 2011, to argue for a pedagogical model for helping students collaboratively code tweets to assess their rhetorical effects and to improve their own awareness and use of microblogging as a communication tool.

Keywords:

• emergency communication
• ethos
• Hurricane Irene
• social media
• Twitter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author conveys sincere thanks to Brett Morrison, Melissa Pompos, William Dorner, Stacey Pigg, and Anna Turner for their assistance with this project. The author gives thanks in particular to guest editor Amy C. Kimme Hea for her support on this article and to the reviewers who provided valuable insights and suggestions.

Notes

The concept of ethos is discussed to some extent in most technical communication textbooks and has been treated extensively in the established technical communication literature. This article does not purport to provide an exhaustive literature review of that material but rather to advance that conversation through the lens of Twitter and emergency communication. See Sullivan, Martin, and Anderson (2003), Henry (2000), and Jasinski (2001).

This Twitter incident was not the first time Paul claimed to be a victim of prosopopoeia at the hands of his own staff. A company called Ron Paul & Associates generated a series of racially inflammatory publications in the 1990s. When these publications reemerged during the 2012 campaign, Paul claimed that he had never even read them (Markon & Crites, 2012).

Examples of problems for individuals and groups caused by Twitter posts abound. Some samples can be found in articles listed in the references portion of this article, including “10 Most Embarrassing Company Tweets” and “Social media mistakes: The memorable messes on Twitter and Facebook in 2012.”

Potts (2011) did extensive and important individual and collaborative research on Twitter and its use during emergencies. Her work focuses largely on how the interface as a technology functions to connect people and how features such as hashtags and other metadata serve to make information more and less accessible to those who need to find it. This research, included in the references to this article, is critical to the study of Twitter in technical communication but is somewhat tangential to this article, which focuses on asking students to study Twitter threads as artifacts to identify ethos-based implications.

For two examples of this extensive area of work, see Sauer (2002) and Grabill and Simmons (1998).

See the Appendix for a classroom activity for analyzing tweets.

For excellent insights about strategies for and principles of coding, see Saldana's (2012) “The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers.”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melody A. Bowdon

Melody A. Bowdon is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Director of the Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Central Florida.