Mediatized governance in environmental disasters: self-organizing community rescue through collaborative online documents

Abstract

The frequency of risks and disasters in contemporary society has created new challenges for rescue governance. Through content analysis and participant observation, this study examined the development of an online collaborative and self-organizing community during the 2021 rainstorm rescue effort in Zhengzhou, China. The study shows that this community provided and optimized major public goods and services, adapted rescue resources to victim needs, facilitated streamlined information transfer, protected privacy, and connected a multitude of actors. The findings illustrate the significance of a new mode of mediatized governance that emphasizes the continuous process of reconciling conflicting interests and encouraging joint action among multiple actors, thereby realizing a flexible and efficient rescue that could not have been achieved by a top-down government-led administration.

Keywords:

• Mediatized governance
• disaster
• online collaborative and self-organizing community
• participant observation
• rescue document

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous journal reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interests were reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Only a very small amount of data could not be directly used for statistics. For example, “completed rescue” and “rescue finished” had the same meaning, and it took the coders’ recognition to merge them.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the general project of the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 18BXW088].

Notes on contributors

Jia Dai

Jia Dai is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, China. Her research focuses on environmental risk communication and social governance and has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Environmental Politics, Environmental Communication, Journalism Practice, the Asian Journal of Communication, and the Chinese Journal of Communication, along with many Chinese journals.

Chenghao Ji

Chenghao Ji (the corresponding author) is an assistant professor at the School of Humanity and Communication, Zhejiang University of Finance & Economics, China. His research focuses on communication and social governance and has been published in the International Journal of Communication and in Chinese journals.

Boying Chen

Boying Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, mainland China. His research interests include mediatized governance, media sociology, new media and social transformation, and environmental communication.