NEW MEDIA AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Abstract

This article examines the role of blogs during the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Using a blog created by South Asian journalists as a case study, the article argues that new media has the potential to be a democratizing agent in lesser developed countries. The article argues that some tsunami-related blogs give regional, subaltern journalists a medium to transcend exploitative accounts of the tsunami's aftermath. The article is also able to use tsunami-related blogs to help highlight questions surrounding new media and disaster reporting in lesser developed countries in general, including discussions of the digital divide.

Keywords:

• blogs
• digital divides
• journalism
• media representations
• natural disasters
• new media

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christina Finneran, Wendy Christensen and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

Headlines and article text from The Pall Mall Gazette (1883) and Daily News (1883).

For example, on 27 August 1883, Reuters News Agency sent a telegraph of the news and a Lloyds agent at Batavia (what is now North Jakarta, Indonesia) also telegraphed London of the news. On August 28, ‘local’ British newspapers such as the Aberdeen Weekly Journal and Bristol Mercury and Daily Post ran the story. Over the next couple of days, Reuter's telegraphs updated journalists in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

As Amarasiri de Silva (2009) notes, international non-governmental organizations have also been found to be ethnocentric in aid efforts.

Victims of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in Northern India, as Gupta et al. (2002) observe, were similarly poor. Vaux (2002) also discusses how caste and poverty in the area affected by the Gujarat earthquake factored into reconstruction efforts.

See Rajamanickam and Prithviraj (2006) for a table of historical Indian Ocean tsunamis.

See http://dailyrhino.blogspot.com/.

A search on Blogger.com showed 5257 blogs with ‘tsunami’ in their title as of 26 December 2005. Though not all of these are related to the Indian Ocean tsunami, many of them are.

See http://blogs.oneindia.in/tsunami/1/showtags.com.

See http://ashatsunamirelief.blogspot.com.

See http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com.

See Welsh Assembly Government (2005), Lack and Sullivan (2008), and Fischer (1998).

See http://tsunamihelpsrilanka.blogspot.com/2005/01/psp-guidelines-to-provide-psychosocial.html for an example of a blog overrun by malicious automated posts.

Hoffman (2004) argues that the ‘decentralized and cross-border nature’ of new information technologies has transformed constructions of the public sphere itself.

See http://lrrp.wordpress.com, http://1seythi.wordpress.com, and http://allindiateso.wordpress.com, respectively.

See http://desimediabitch.blogspot.com/2004/12/asia-quake-morquendi-in-sri-lanka.html (15 January 2005).

See http://desimediabitch.blogspot.com/2004/12/tsunami-reports-in-us-blogger-report.html (15 January 2005).

See http://desimediabitch.blogspot.com/2005/01/shameful.html (15 January 2005).

SEA-EAT had 14 unique posters (writing 49 posts) from 26 December 2004 to 1 January 2005 and a volume of 510 comments during the same period.