Protocolos de Seguridad del Colegio Chile Norte Estallido Social

In September 2010 and February 2011, when the earthquakes struck the Canterbury region, social media were already fully in use in New Zealand. Immediately after the February earthquake, social media served as a supporting platform for government agencies to send out updates and for citizens to share information and mobilise. On Twitter, information was shared using the hashtag ‘#eqnz (Bruns and Burgess 2012). Among the governmental agencies, CERA’s (@CEQgovtnz) and Christchurch City Council’s Twitter accounts were particularly active in tweeting information while accounts owned by broadcasting media and community groups often served as amplifiers of the official messages. Compared with the September earthquake, the February event produced a larger volume of tweets (Bruns and Burgess 2012). The University of Canterbury made use of social media to share information with students and staff, and Facebook became prominent as a source of information for many months (Dabner 2012). On the same point, soon after the September event, Facebook became the central mobilization point for the so-called UC Student Volunteer Army, a group of volunteers led by Sam Johnson and other students of the University of Canterbury, whose aim was to give practical and emotional help to the affected residents. In this case, Facebook served as a powerful coordination tool for mass deployment of volunteers and for crisis communication (http://www.sva.org.nz/history/). Another volunteer-led initiative that harnessed new technologies was the Christchurch Recovery Map (CRM). CRM was a real-time map of the earthquake affected areas and represented a way to crowdsource, display and re-distribute data about location and the practicality of essential

Usage by Authorities and Citizens in the PDR Phase of the Canterbury Earthquakes (September 2010 – February 2011)

services during and after the disaster (Bourk et al. 2015). Government agencies faced overwhelming difficulties to fully integrate the information produced and managed by emergent groups into on-line platforms for their response and recovery activities (Bourk et al. 2015). On this point, in abandoning a centralized approach to disaster communication and in harnessing citizen-based web initiatives government agencies fell short (Bourk and Holland 2014; Bourk et al. 2015)

Several on-line groups were established after the earthquakes and they carried over their activities during the reconstruction period. According to the inventory prepared by Carlton and Vallance (2013), many of the community-led initiatives and organizations that took on recovery tasks existed merely as on-line groups. Some of these groups actively challenged the top-down approach put in place by some recovery agencies. They used social media to propose “an 'alternative reality' of the recovery process. In this respect the study conducted by Simons (2016) confirmed that social media were considered by members of the on-line groups to be a source of information that was more trustworthy than official and mainstream media. This resulted in these groups becoming “insular, defensive and anti-governmental in nature” (Simons 2016). The little disaster scholarship that addresses the use of social media in the long- term disaster recovery phase (Farinosi and Trerè 2010) notes that social media come to prominence in the recovery period as an “alternative public space” in which residents share recovery information and discuss problems in opposition to what is recounted in the official information outlets. As happened for the L’Aquila earthquake (where, despite the many examples of failures, recovery was presented as a sort of “miracle”), in Christchurch alternative narratives on social media countered the

Usage by Authorities and Citizens in the PDR Phase of the Canterbury Earthquakes (September 2010 – February 2011)

Government’s accounts of success. . Sarah Miles described well this process in a blog post published on March 26, 2013: -

“Behind the scenes there is a dearth of information exchanging hands and being created. No longer are people isolated, they are using social media to fill the communication gap which is generated by the mainstream media. Social media provide the opportunity for the public to actively engage in the creation of information and acquire knowledge, rather than to be passive consumers. This is a way of counteracting the imbalance of access to critical information which would assist them in resolving some of the problems they face – such as the resolution of insurance claims and dealings with organizations such as CERA and EQC”.

What Sarah Miles described here is a process, enabled by new communication technology, by which people become producers and brokers of information, rather than merely consumers. In this newly created communication landscape, the dearth of accurate and trustworthy information by government agencies and mainstream media was balanced through making use of the set of knowledge and skills brought by ordinary citizens who interact on social media. Social media were also used to produce satirical videos and comics in order to unmask the real situation that people were experiencing. Videos were uploaded on YouTube, such as “the EQC blues” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_90YGqCbSfY) or

“Meet the Muntstones”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlfLjz0PUDU&feature=share). These have been ways to express frustration over the management of some aspects of the recovery. The history of the shopping centre at South New Brighton (one of the costal areas in the eastern suburbs most affected by

Usage by Authorities and Citizens in the PDR Phase of the Canterbury Earthquakes (September 2010 – February 2011)

the earthquake) is emblematic. CERA decided to close and then demolish the shopping centre because a crack was found. Apparently no consultation was effected before this decision but a few days after the demolition CERA put up a sign asking people what they wanted in the empty space. Residents reacted producing a video of protest about this lack of engagement in the decision-making (“What’s worse, a crack in the wall? Or the sound of nothing happening at all?” sings a girl in the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtHqUaviveg).

New technologies also served to make information sharing between the stakeholders involved in the recovery process easier. Dionisio et al (2015) presented a project called “Greening the Greyfield”, in which in the post- earthquake context in Christchurch geospatial tools are envisioned as platforms for the production of shared development scenarios, participatory urban planning and engagement between groups.

5.4. Specific research goals and methodology: similarities and