To Prepare for Disaster: Small is Beautiful in Media!

Prof Pat Longstaff

Pat Longstaff, Associate Professor of the Public Communication School at Syracuse, says that current media policy, and commercial media’s drive for profit, are producing communication systems that are more vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and make us more vulnerable.

We live in a world of surprises and many communication systems fail with problems caused by surprises. The US military call some surprises “unkunks” or “unknown unknowns”, others are referred to as “black swans” – irregular occurrences, we also get other surprises such as discontinuity in long-term trends and the emergence of new information. Surprises are a fact of life. To be responsible we have to plan for them.

What happens to communication systems in a natural disaster such as a tsunami or a terrorist attack like 9/11? What are common failures?

Media are often caught off-guard because their plans don’t contemplate surprises, in the cost-efficient environment of commercial media they can’t justify the spend on independent energy supplies and other technical backups, and this can be critical. “Efficiency and resilience are incompatible” explains Longstaff.

Others communication systems fail in disaster situations because people ignore them. In many places there is low public confidence in government sources – take for example the recent government advice on vaccinations in the UK: people don’t trust it, and are ignoring it. “Our most important asset in an emergency is a trusted and reliable source of information” says Longstaff.

When these failures occur in practice they can cost thousands of lives, so why aren’t we preventing them?

Apart from the drive for efficiency and profit, we also live in a culture of blame that stops us from learning. “When things go wrong we try to blame others, we stop proper feedback on problems. If we don’t get feedback we can’t adapt to avoid problems the next time round, no adaptation means no resilience and greater vulnerability. We know this, but we still assume things will work predictably”. Vowing to devote the remainder of her working life to this problem, Pat implores us: “If we want to learn, adapt and become resilient we have to stop the blame game”.

What should we be doing? How do we build communications systems that bounce back in disasters?

“Information has to flow from the bottom up as well as from the top down” says Pat. People often tend to believe each other in an emergency more than they believe official sources.

In cases where there is physical danger people need to know: is this local? Global? has it happened before? What happened last time? what is the risk to me and my family? how can I manage this danger? what are my options? what options are working and what options are not working? Providing an evaluation of options available to people, based on local experience, is crucial. Research shows that people panic when they feel they have no options.

The concentration of media ownership gives us broadcasters that are thin on the ground, they do not have an adequate network of stringers to collect reliable local information, only community-based media do that. Also in technical ways, the fewer the communication systems we have the more vulnerable we become. More, smaller systems are collectively likely to be more resilient to surprises.

Beyond one-to-many broadcast information, people need to make contact with family members and friends. “What happened to my sister” might be much more important information in the decision-making of a family than “what happened to the next town”. This is a role that can be performed in part by community media, by putting people in contact with each other, and one which benefits from resilient telecommunication networks. Most people trust their own family and human networks more than anyone else - so these channels of communication need to be safeguarded too.

“It nearly goes without saying”, Longstaff continues, “that in times of emergency, competing media should co-operate”. But you can’t always rely on it!

Supporting small-scale, community-based and self-sufficient communication systems, such as community radios, is a good way of preparing to deal with disasters. This should be supported by policymakers dealing with emergency preparedness.

Perhaps the Sphere project, the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response (devised and adopted by humanitarian NGOs and the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement) can become a new platform for promoting community media?

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Pat Longstaff worked previously as a lawyer representing newspapers, broadcasters, advertising agencies and telephone companies. She now specialises in business and public policy issues affecting the communications industry. She teaches at Syracuse on current trends in the communications industry, global communication issues and communications law/policy. She is also a Research Associate at Harvard University's Center for Information Policy Research where she works on issues of global communications policy.

She has written for many mass media and trade publications on her research topics. Her recent book, The Communications Toolkit: How to Build or Regulate Any Communications Business, was published by MIT Press in 2002.

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Related links:

You can see Pat Longstaff’s paper “Security, Resilience, and Communication in Unpredictable Environments Such as Terrorism, Natural Disasters and Complex Technology”at the Harvard website here:
www.pirp.harvard.edu and click the “publications” link.

Sphere project
http://www.sphereproject.org

International Strategy for Disaster Reduction: Natural Disaster in the Media
http://www.chmi.cz/katastrofy/peters.html