So Megan Finn is from over the information she's an assistant professor
this is her book that from my last fall with MIT, press documenting aftermath which
you'll hear about today
She has a PhD from the Berkeley School of Information and she was a postdoc at my research
Here's someone on campus you could potentially, you know, kindly likely asked
to chat about such opportunities
so I know that a lot of our grad students have taken classes with Megan before
and are very impressed with her work so this is a really nice way to hear in a more formal setting
to the things that Megan is doing, so let's welcome Megan Finn
Thanks, thanks
Katie thanks guys
Thank you so much for hosting me and thank you for being inside on a beautiful afternoon for your last colloquium of the year
So congrats to everybody for making it through
Yes, as Katie said, I'm an assistant professor over in the information school, please get in touch if you want to talk about anything
Especially since we're a small group today, and I know some of you very well
I just please feel free to interrupt me at any point during my talk if you have questions about
about what I'm saying, or
Want more information I can talk endlessly about stuff in my book. So happy to elaborate and anywhere that you're interested
Okay, so if your community had been hit by an earthquake a strong storm or another disaster
afterwards you would probably look to secure your own safety and those of
Those of the people around you and then after you were sure that everybody around you was safe
you would look to figure out what had happened and tell other people importantly how you were doing and
the institutions that we think of as being associated with this today, so
We would probably look to things like Facebook to let people know that we're okay. We maybe call them
We might look on television or online and hope that officials from FEMA or Washington State
Emergency response team or other local responders that they would be available to help us
Make sense of what's happened and figure out how to be safe
But what would happen if many of these institutions and technologies weren't in place? So today I'm gonna talk about how people
communicated and shared information in a number of historical earthquakes
in the Bay Area, so
There's a couple of questions
That motivate my thinking in this space and are really sort of driving the book project
so the first thing is what kind of information orders existed after earthquakes in the past and how did they shape disaster experiences and
Importantly, I'm asking this in a comparative situation. So I'm saying what about what kinds of changes in technologies shape
Changes in people's experiences with disasters and understanding how information orders facilitate possibilities for knowledge
Really has consequences for many people not only for the survivors of earthquake but also for aid organizations and researchers like myself
and then the other question that I
address in the book and I'm gonna talk about a little bit less today is what happens when information
Infrastructures and information orders are injured or even destroyed in this question
It's particularly interesting to ask with information orders in disasters because disasters are these weird
situations where paradoxically people are there's an intense interest in making use of information infrastructures in making use of
information because people are trying to figure out what happened right, but they're also
Often injured or being challenged in other ways
And so in order to address these questions I'm gonna just have sort of four stops on our tour today and thinking about this so
We're gonna look at the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake. So the Hayward Fault. So this is a map of the Bay Area
And this these shake maps the areas I shake the most
Intensely are in red and the areas that shake less intensely are in yellow
So you can see sort of San Francisco at that point coming up in the middle
This is the bay area and on the east side runs the Hayward Fault
and then we'll go to the 1906 earthquake which occurred off the coast of San Francisco and lastly the
89 Loma Prieta earthquake
So San Francisco is sort of at the top of that map and the Loma Prieta earthquake
Occurs further south and then we'll talk about today
In the information infrastructure that is in place today
Um, I hope that by examining the past we can make the president, you know, some of the stories will sound very familiar
and some will sound quite
Unfamiliar and it helps us sort of reconsider and reimagine what's possible today?
Okay, so on October 21st
1868 a large earthquake
happened on the Hayward Fault
In the East Bay of San Francisco, and it was the it was very sparsely populated at this point
So Alameda County which is the county that covers the East Bay only had 25,000 residents
And so these small towns along the Hayward Fault
experienced quite a bit of damage as a result of this earthquake and within San Francisco
There was also quite a bit of damage in San Francisco is much more populated at this point. I think it had about
150,000 residents but most of the damage in San Francisco at this point was on what was called made ground which is man-made land landfill
And in the midst of this earthquake we see these letters like this my dear mother
You will have heard all about our great earthquake the exaggerated reports and the succeeding reports making light of the whole affair
But a few words about it directly from one who experienced it may have a peculiar
Interest today is Sunday the earthquake occurred last Wednesday at five minutes to eight
I was just finishing breakfast and folding my napkin when the house a
two-story double house was shaken as if by a giant the wall swayed the timber creek didn't groan you sort of get the point
So what is William Henry Knight the author of this lovely letter to his mother talking about?
What are these exaggerated reports he's referring to and what are these efforts at downplaying what happened?
so first
Let's talk about the exaggerated reports so immediately after the earthquake
there were
many many telegrams sent back east and some of them some of the first ones had reports about damage that were very vague and
some later reports that it was like about a million dollars worth of damage and then we have this group of
Elite San Franciscans who are members of the Chamber of Commerce
Who literally gather in the back of a bank
to put together a telegram that's going to tell the correct story of what happened and this telegram effectively says
Don't worry about it. The damage was not that bad
It was all unmade ground to shoddily made buildings and the damage estimate is shouldn't you know?
it shouldn't exceed three hundred thousand dollars and
So these damage estimates are obviously sort of ridiculous to make in the medium, you know the same day as an earthquake, right?
How are you to know the value?
Of what's happened? But there are these important ways of communicating effectively like how bad how bad was this?
So they send this estimate out east
And it lands in certain places and other places call it like an affront to rational thinking
And sort of disparage these estimates and say oh no
No, it's the figure is much much higher, you know, it's at least a million dollars
So these are sort of the effective the the efforts at downplaying the earthquake and why would they want to downplay this earthquake?
so San Francisco at this point is home of all of the industries in California and
California's industries at this point are primarily of extractive right? It's taking stuff out of the ground
It's farming
and
timber to a certain area
so so California is built on these extractive industries built in the ground that you ideally want to be like
Reliable right like you don't want your ground shaking if you're worried working on pulling stuff out of it
So they want to put together this whole narrative that says it's not that bad your money's safe with us
Laborers come out this way, you know keep working out here
So they put together this this narrative that really downplays the earthquake
meanwhile, we have
People who say take pictures and make postcards like the picture and upper right was by
Eadweard Muybridge, and it became a postcard
And these are also postcards this is the top of a letterhead
So you have other folks who are saying no, you know the sensation, you know
Let's sort of sensationalize this let's take pictures of the worst damage
We're gonna try to actually make some money off of this thing people seem really interested in this story, right?
So on one hand, you have these huge efforts to downplay it on the other hand you have efforts
To exaggerate it in order to like sell newspapers. So this is a newspaper
The daily morning Chronicle, which is owned by
or started by these sort of infamous two young brothers who are like teenagers when they started it and
At this point people still are sending newspapers in the mail as a way of like updating friends and family
And so they does daily morning chronicle prints this illustrated edition. That's for friends back east, right?
It's for people to send to their friends back east
And so you have this sort of like variety of
Ways of sort of trying to tell the story and of course people like William Henry Knight have to come in
Amidst all of these reports to try to like give his version of what happened
But of course it's being sent through the mail because at this point the Telegraph is really too expensive for common people to use
Okay
So the earthquake public in San Francisco was treated to these like exaggerated stories these downplaying stories
but they really advocated for more information about what was happening and actually sort of
Wanted a more authoritative report to tell them how do I build safely here, right?
so as far away as Chicago people started looking forward to this report from a group of learned men in San Francisco and
Essentially that was referring to the California Academy of Sciences. And so this is a group that had been putting out
papers about earthquakes in the proceedings for the California Academy of Sciences
but sort of seismic knowledge in California at this point is not you know, the sort of like
Preeminent place to study earthquakes that it is today at this point, you know
Very little of the sort of global knowledge on science seismicity from a scientific standpoint resides in California
It's mostly in Japan and in Europe at this point
So they're putting out these reports in the Proceedings, you know
Berkeley as a university is you know, sort of getting started right now in 1868 in 1869
So there aren't a lot of professional scientists in the area
But this sort of group of of lurid men is supposed to put together this report and they get together and they have some meetings
and they just start putting evidence together and think about
putting this report
Meanwhile, this San Francisco Chamber of Commerce
Which is the very group that put forth the Telegraph telegram trying to really downplay the earthquake damage
Puts together this earthquake committee and this earthquake committee also
endeavors to produce a report and that effort ends up sort of swallowing the effort of the California Academy of Sciences and
you know the this Chamber of Commerce reasons that
While earthquakes are definitely bad for business understanding them is actually also quite good for business
Right, like they want to actually be able to build buildings that aren't gonna fall down
however, this report never gets produced and circulated in the ways that people expect it to and there's been a lot of
debate and discussion within the history of
Geology community about whether the report was produced and suppressed or whether it was under like sort of deliberately
underfunded the
Author one of the authors of the report died in the process of putting it together and like nobody could locate his papers
So there's sort of lots of questions as to why this never got produced, but it it did never get produced
So
People basically never got the sort of authoritative account of what had happened that they were really searching for
So I want to step back at this point and just talk about some concepts that I have been
Using so far on the talk and get a little bit more
Backbone to what I'm using. So I've been talking a lot about public information infrastructures and I am drawing
Very much on we're coming out of STS into a certain degree information studies from people like Lee Star and Jeff Baker and Paul Edwards
to talk about public information infrastructures
And they say, you know infrastructure is relational
that people depending on
their sort of positionality with the information infrastructure might experience it as
pervasive enabling resources in the networked form that are mostly invisible to them or it might be their everyday work practice and
For these scholars infrastructures are importantly these really heterogeneous
entities
including institutions practices
and also the sort of material parts of it tubes and wires and computers and things like that that we tend to typically associate with
infrastructures
public information infrastructures both embody politics and produce the kind of politics
so in some scholars will take this a step further and say as
sort of complex socio technical assemblages that
that infrastructures are also
Ideological vessels that confer meeting meaning upon the societies that produce them
So this is work of like Brian Larkin for example, and he says, you know functioning infrastructures
Are these symbols that society is modern that society is progressive and you know US history STS anthro
geography scholars have noted
Infrastructures are not only symbolic of modernity, but they're crucial for ordering it and stabilizing it as well
So for all of these reasons
The sort of stability of public information infrastructure is in these moments of disaster is particularly interesting for me and some of these accounts
That I looked at, you know, there's there's real genuine anxiety and angst when things don't work
So for an example in 1868
There's moments when the telegraphic infrastructure breaks and stops working and people assume the worst, you know
San Francisco has fallen to the ground
We can't get a hold of them
You know hundreds of people have probably died, right?
So these infrastructures are sort of also these sources for interpreting what happened, right? They circulate news there
There's of circulation and production of information and also sources for interpreting what's happened?
okay, and so I think of
You know, we've sort of multiple public information infrastructures supporting different earthquake public's
That are articulated together in
information orders and
Information order is a term that I borrow from Chris Bailey who's a historian who uses it to talk about?
systems for surveillance and control in colonial India and
and he's really thinking of it as a heuristic and he makes this really interesting argument, which is basically if we talk about
Societies having like an economic order or a political order
Doesn't it also make sense to talk about them having meaningfully having an information order in that information order?
Overlaps of the political order and overlaps of the economic order but is importantly different from them
So I'm borrowing that term from Chris Bailey and then you know, of course this is a comm department
So there's lots of conversations about what public's are how they're constituted. I draw pretty heavily from like North
American pragmatist tradition who formulates this conception of material public's and I find this really particularly helpful because
It sort of dovetails. Well with ideas around information infrastructures as these sort of socio material objects
All right
All right, so
So these are the concepts that I'm trying to work with throughout the book. I
developed this idea of event epistemology as a way of considering how
information orders and disasters co-construct possibilities for knowing in these particular event moments
So I'm trying to make this trying to come up with this account for how event epistemologies are produced after
Disasters when things are broken when things have been shaken after these are earthquakes
So early in the morning on April 18th 1906
There was a major earthquake off the coast of California and that earthquake actually broke
remains within San Francisco so that when people started cooking breakfast in the morning
Or sort of other small fires that had been started as a result of the earthquake
Started burning there was no water with which to fight fight them
So a fire burned through San Francisco over four days
It burned the entire downtown of San Francisco
It burned Chinatown and it burned South of Market, which is where most of the laborers at the time lift
San Francisco's population at the time was about
450,000 people and almost half of those people were displaced their homes burned to the ground
And so it raises these really dramatic questions of
and again sort of turning this from an informational perspective of how did people account for each other when their
friends their employers their family
everybody had been dispersed really really quickly and without notice so
Sarah Phillips writes to her husband who's in upstate New York at the time. I went directly to the
Western Union office which was a wreck, however, there were hundreds ahead of us worked our way
through the debris to the desk
when I saw the pile of telegrams waiting to be sent I was told that the wires were down
I left the office at Pine and Montgomery and went to the postal
at Montgomery
Market the office was dreadfully wrecked, but one machine was taking away. So I left my message when the fire swept all the way
When the fire swept all the way I thought that possibly all the messages were destroyed the next day
I sent a message by Western Union a young man who was going to Hayward's took them to send them
and Sarah
Sarah and her husband George go on to exchange these letters with each other we're Georgia. Thank God. I was so worried
I wanted to hear you and Sarah saying I know I know I know I went to you know every single western union office
I tried to send things in the mail
She eventually says oh, well, you know the post office is accepting mail on all kinds of peculiar
materials
So the post office immediately after the earthquake essentially says will send mail for free
To people in San Francisco, so they accept mail on any, you know type of paper that people can locate
and so she's
Desperately trying to find her friends and her friends that are in San Francisco as well
so she starts walking through the city and she tells these really heartbreaking stories of you know, mothers looking for their children and
Sort of familiar and imagery for us now that signs, you know, dotting fences of people who are looking for their loved ones
She's walking through the city and eventually and you know some one of the later letters she tells George
I'm trying to find my friend Lizzy Lisa and and I'm gonna start going to check registration bureaus and this really interesting
Sort of
complex network of
registration bureaus emerges after the earthquake which includes
for example
newspapers or running registrations
Fraternal organizations are saying hey register with US newspapers as far away as New York are saying hey
Make sure you you know, go register
Go register sort of as a generic term after the earthquake so that people can find you and eventually these efforts seem to
consolidate and there's kind of like a couple of
branch registries in the East Bay and out near refugee camps and they get consolidated in a central location and
I'm sure this number is wildly and accurate but at least one estimate of how many records they had was thirty five thousand
Which is incredible and they were getting as many as three thousand new records a day
according to this one newspaper article and the way
Registration worked was that if you had survived the earthquake and had been displaced you would go to the registration bureau and he'd say hey
You know, my name is Megan
I used to live at this address
And you can now find me here so that if Katie wanted to come find me she'd go to the registration bureau and say hey
I'm looking for Megan and she used to live here and they pull up you know my thing and say oh
Well, you can now find her at this address
So registration bureaus emerged as a sort of interesting way for people to account for each other
a lot of people also importantly advertised in personals in newspapers, and I don't need to again telecommunications department people this but
Newspapers in San Francisco at the time were absolutely central to the public sphere. They occupied the fanciest buildings in downtown, San Francisco
They were owned by the wealthiest families and they were central to the way you know
Interpersonal connection happened after the earthquake not just in terms of telling the narrative of what happened. So you see people advertising mrs
J a Pierce of Salinas California desires information for brother Jack Nattrass who was last heard from
775 Mission Street in San Francisco
So people are using all of these different really interesting means of trying to find each other
However, there are sort of interesting ways in which people were not accounted for as well. So
So when we look at how people counted the dead after the earthquake we can sort of see that there were
Ways in which these accountings very much did not work and you know this sort of infrastructures as these ongoing
socio technical processes
We're really good about circulating, you know information about certain people's welfare who are impacted by the earthquake
But you know it sort of failed when it came to this problem of counting the dead
So immediately after the earthquake
There were efforts that started up to
account for the dead and newspapers were publishing lists of
the names of the deceased in the papers
Admiral Admiral Greely whose general when he came out to San Francisco
He was on the East Coast at the time
But he was formally stationed in San Francisco when he finally made it out to San Francisco
He right away requested that Hospital cemeteries coroner's
Come forth and essentially give him records
So that he could come up with a list of the names of people who died
And you know the next day in the papers, you see this like Greeley's death roll
In many of the major newspapers
And so Greeley in his final reports estimates
somewhere around five hundred people in San Francisco died and another
150 or so outside of the city
Other reports generated so there's this sort of progressive
committee that was in charge of
distributing funds relief and recovery funds and they had a committee on
statistics and the Committee on
Statistics also attempted to come up with a report of how many people had died and they ended up estimating I think around
seven hundred people who died
but it was very inexact and sort of unclear how they had come up with this number and so in about
40 years later or fifty years later Gladys Hansen who is an archivist for the Public Library in San Francisco
I'm sort of one of my like informational heroes of my book
So Gladys handsome looks at this number and she says this does not look, right
anecdotal reports said that you know these really
overpopulated tenements for working-class San Franciscans south of market they were on liquid ground that was
Liquefaction grounds so they would have sunk and then the fires that burned through would have incinerated everything
These were really hot fires that burned for days and days on a time at a time
so she says, you know knowing that also the fact that Chinatown was filled with
very
Poor quality buildings and also very overpopulated
and because of racism at the time it is unlikely that anybody
at least in this sort of english-speaking part of
this
Information order attempted to count the number of DC's Chinese Japanese and Koreans living in San Francisco at the time
So she says all of this, you know, it doesn't really sound right
So she starts this amazing effort where she first goes through all of the newspapers
and actually tries to pull out all the names of people who are listed as dead and then she starts going through files for
courts from land records from coroner's office hospitals
And cemeteries and she ends up being able to name all these years leaders. She's able to name. I think nine hundred
almost a thousand people
who died and
again, she says, you know, I'm only able to come up with like 22 names of
Chinese Americans and six names of Japanese Americans, which seem very very low
So she reasoned that and and folks who lived in this tenement housing these laborers were often itinerant workers
They were poor and their families for example wouldn't have had money to you know
Call a news alert a newspaper that their relative was missing. For example
So she says there's probably because of class reasons
Because of racism there's probably lots and lots of people missing from this list
So she ended up estimating that it was probably closer to two or three thousand people who died during the earthquake
So while the disaster did mean that many reports and accounts of the disaster were produced a
System of finding others was developed system of registering people receiving benefits
Which I didn't get to talk about was designed and executed. This has all the sort of trappings of this reflexive modern society
The dead were not systematically recognized and drew Gilpin Faust in her book
This Republic of suffering talks about the sort of massive
organizational efforts that were undertaken after the Civil War in order to name and bury the dead
it makes it clear that it you know, it required a lot of institutional effort
And so, you know one can sort of reason that it was possible at this time
But that counting and naming the dead was simply not an activity that the military that the local government or any of the relief
organizations wanted to undertake
The information order that produces event event epistemology has also made it nearly impossible to count all of the dead people even today
Okay, so when Loma Prieta earthquake struck on October 17th 1989
San Jose University students in an introductory mass media and culture class were working on individual media consumption Diaries the
Students were asked to self-report
what media they were making use of over a 5-day period and many students were doing this media diary when the earthquake hit which is
And somebody who was doing their dissertation research on this and kind enough to publish their data
So that I could look at it many many years later
So one media diary said said after I was sure I was okay and so were my neighbors
So this is like there's tons and tons of research to support that
This is what people do after disasters. They make sure they're okay
They check on their the people around them. I ran upstairs to find our battery-operated radio
No one in our apartment complex had one but me says I can't wait to hear what's up. We have no electricity
But thank God we do have this battery-operated radio and it's one of the only people in her
Apartment complex to have this the student said she updated her neighbors as the news rolled in and she headed to bed really emotionally drained
But when the electricity was restored
the next day she was eager to turn on the television and anxious to see with her own eyes what had happened and she
Was shocked to see the effects of the earthquake and said Jesus quake looked like it did a lot of damage
So the reports on the most severe and somewhat exaggerated damage quickly became a challenge as phone calls from fans and family started rolling in
Phone call from parents and alais mother-in-law and New York friends from Hawaii and Modesto
I tried to calm everyone but it's too late the media really scared my family. My husband and I were scared too
Eventually two days after the earthquake the student began to feel burned out and listening to TV for so many hours
She bought a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle the most important newspaper at this time
Expecting more accurate and measured coverage but was greeted by bloody pictures everywhere. It looks like the whole city was up in flames
so this is the San Francisco Chronicle the day after the earthquake and that is
Well in accurate headline hundreds of people did not die fortunately
Somewhere in the order of 60 people
Died and most of them the people who died died
On this freeway in Oakland which collapse the top layer of the freeway collapsed onto the bottom layer of the freeway
this earthquake happened during a World Series baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's
Which importantly meant that many many people in the Bay Area were home watching television and not commuting home from work
Which was lucky in some sense
It also meant that the national media was in San Francisco at the time
Which really ends up shaping the types of stories that gets told get told and the audience's that they're told for
in the course of the story that I'm telling the 89 earthquake is particularly important because there are a number of sort of
Anticipatory technologies that have been put in place in the form of state
bureaucratic disaster response plans and from an information perspective
the
sort of imaginary that's articulated in these response plans is that you're gonna have the
Government who is going to collect the information
They're going to give it to the media which is this like unproblematic conduit to the public
Which is then gonna learn what's going on? And of course, this is not how things work at all so the media
Not surprisingly follows its own nose, you know
They're looking for the story that they want to tell they're looking for an interesting story that appeals to their audience
The government envisioned that there are public information officers on the local level would be like on the ground
Collecting data and compiling it into reports that they would share with County officials
And the county officials would share with the regional officials of regional officials
Would Sarah with the state officials and they would come out with this very?
Nice and sort of complete report about what was going on. And of course local officials were very very very busy
Working on what was directly in front of them not writing reports for people who are far farther away
Furthermore the plans did not anticipate
that the
People working for the government the emergency managers themselves
Would be learning about what happened from the media and this actually had real consequences
So in Santa Cruz, for example, we saw in the media diaries
Some of these people say oh my god. This damage is awful
so that was also what emergency managers in Santa Cruz were seeing and so
Though the earthquake damage was actually in some ways greatest in Santa Cruz County
Emergency managers there were watching the television in thinking my god
San Francisco is ruined they were only seeing these images of the collapse viaduct in Oakland
This sort of burning of the marina, which is a very wealthy area of San Francisco
and the
Sort of broken Bay Bay Bridge, which is the image. That's really stuck in my mind for whatever reason
So those were the images that they were greeted with and they thought my god, San Francisco is ruined
We're on our own down here in Santa Cruz like no one's coming to help us
And at the same time we see
that alternative public information infrastructures are
Constituted through spanish-language media to make sense of what happened immediately after the earthquake
So we had the media focused on these stories happening in San Francisco and Oakland
and
Meanwhile, the spanish-language media is actually starting to tell a very different story. So close to the earthquake epicenter
Is this town called Watsonville and Watsonville is heavily populated
with
Farm workers and it's over sixty percent Latin X population
And so the spanish-language media is actually getting these calls from people
Talking about what they're experiencing it and they're sort of able to very quickly hone in on the fact that some of the worst damage
Is in this Watsonville area
So these so there's this interesting
Alternative public information infrastructure that's constituted through the media but also through forums and other types of documentation
that are
Involved in getting aid after the earthquake. So in the absence of having these forums available in multiple languages
community based organizations in towns
Like Watsonville So there's this really wonderful story of a community-based organization called Salud para la Gente who
works to translate these forums into Spanish
They set up a clinic in an information booth at the central Watsonville Plaza. They offer translation services
For helping people understand building tags. So all the buildings that are injured are tagged red
Yellow green based on how safe they are for people to enter
So they help people understand these building tags
And when people are moved out of temporary shelters, and they're eligible to apply for FEMA assistance
They help work with them on these forms to get assistance
but language wasn't the only factor causing difficulty for
Latin X and other residents that the area to gain access to FEMA aid
the
Multi-generational families or having multiple families living under one roof made it really hard
Because it didn't fit in the model of a household that FEMA assumed and so the kinds of proof of residency records
that people needed in order to gain access to aid for things like
rental assistance, for example
Were unavailable
So some of these earthquake publics were really excluded from the formal disaster response apparatus that was set up by the state
for linguistic and also because of culture and class related reasons and these
Alternative public information infrastructures really support these overlapping groups and generating knowledge about the earthquake
Okay, so today I have these two images of the cover of the National Incident Management System and
a phone, of course
and so I
Try to articulate what I've been calling like this document dialectic and on one hand we have today an enormous state
response apparatus in place and
Though the idea of who is included in the public is broader than it was in 1989
The state still envisions itself as being a producer of like an authoritative voice of what happened like a very sort of singular
narrative
Establishing what happened? And this is very different than social media, which has a much more multi vocal approach
Where anybody can say
Give their narrative give their description of what they believed happened, but these overlap in very interesting ways
So if we look at the disaster response
plans today as these ways of accessing how the state imagines things are gonna work and you know,
They're prescriptive, but they're obviously not deterministic
The most sort of interesting document to start with I think is the National Incident Management System and the National Incident Management System is
describes an organizational structure that is supposed to be
Replicated in every single disaster regardless of the disaster size and regardless of the type of disaster
and it comes out of California wildfire fighting in the
1970s and they had this problem where people would show up to a wildfire and there would be different roles
Depending on what agency you're in
And people might use different names to describe their job
And so NIMS is supposed to sort of help do away with this by having this really really kind of flexible
organizational structure that can expand and contract depending on the size of the disaster but every single
agency and organization whether it's
City and County of San Francisco
Emergency Management or FEMA
knows what the sort of roles and responsibilities are
Associated with responding and they have these different sort of modules that you can plug in as well
so if it involves hazardous materials, for example
You would use one of their sort of
Annexes and that would be this enix that put in a sort of an auxilary
Organizational structure, but again, everybody sort of knows what this is in advance and how it's supposed to be organized
And from an informational standpoint, it articulates a really interesting system that's called the joint information system
That ideally is supposed to generate these authoritative public information
reports
the other sort of interesting
Interesting development in the last say 10 to 15 years is
This idea of situational awareness and situational awareness comes out of aviation psychology in the 1960s
But has been drawn into the disaster response play space and it's meant to describe
A sort of state of knowledge where you understand what is going on?
You have all of these information sources to understand what is going on and then the sort of ideal scenario
You're sort of this decision-maker who's in a room who has to decide where to deploy resources. For example
And you have great situational awareness which gives you certain knowledge in order to make these decisions well
So situational awareness is sort of this interesting term that's deployed and say like the post-katrina reports
Some of the federal reports are like well we didn't make the best decisions because we didn't have good situational awareness at the time, right?
so it's the sort of interesting idea and it's also interesting because it's this way in which
Sort of in the 89 earthquake we might say there's this very one-way model where people imagine the government informing the public
Situational awareness reverses that in some sense and allows the public a more active role in
Informing the state as to what's happening
So the state sort of envisions itself like hoovering up all of this information to form this idea of situational awareness
with which they can make decisions
But obviously
The sort of growth of this
amazing state apparatus has to contend with
these interesting logics in
social media platforms and other privately owned
communication telecommunication companies
So one example of
How social media companies are starting to think of their role?
and
Disaster response is something like Facebook safety check and so I argue that Facebook safety check
Constitutes what
Tarleton Gillespie recalls a calculated public
so it's essentially walks through its social graph, you know, if there's an
Some kind of event that they deem
worthy and this is also controversial is like what counts as a disaster for Facebook is kind of interesting and we've actually
outsourced that now to a third-party company
so, you know should they deem something worthy as a disaster they
Activate safety check and then they use this algorithm to walk through their graph to decide who they think might be
Affected by this or might know somebody affected by that and then they ask them. Hey, are you? Okay, right?
So there's sort of interesting logics based baked in
Baked into these these entities like safety check and then Facebook also allows you to fundraise
After a disaster has happened and then they take a tiny percentage of whatever you make
so there's sort of these interesting ways in which
You see these private social media companies are both
Sort of supplying information in some sense to the state
Right, like there's this infrastructure for the state to figure out what's going on in the public
And the state of course is using social media platforms to put their own story
It's their own narratives out of what's happened right in some sense
This is like the really direct conduit that they imagine they once imagine the media would be
So they can you know, put their press conference directly onto YouTube
Without having to worry about how you know, somebody's going to interpret it
But then also these social media companies start to envision are starting to envision themselves as having a real role in disaster response
And of course, this is like very concerning from a public welfare
standpoint
Last year during the Paradise fires
Verizon throttled the Cal Fire's
the Cal Fire's
data plans
and then up sold them services after they had blocked them and then when California state
Legislators decided to try to pass some laws to prevent this from happening Verizon lobbied against it
so there's like real reasons to be concerned about the private ownership of
platforms today and and the sort of backbone for communication
Okay
So stepping back. I've run through all of these different cases that I've been thinking with and
Returning to these original questions I asked so what are these information orders after?
Disasters in these historical moments and how do things change?
And I sort of have three ways. I want to get at these questions. So first is around this question of information practices
so hopefully by giving these first-person accounts of how people experienced earthquakes and particularly their
Information and communication experiences around the earthquakes I gave you a sense that this idea of maintaining
Status with your loved ones, right the sort of status maintenance work that we all do is not an entirely new phenomenon
I think a lot of
Press particularly in the sort of late Ott's was like nobody's ever done this before
and of course
That's not true
And it's actually pretty remarkable to look at the amazing work arounds that people have to undertake
Be it to send a letter to send a telegram to make a phone call and to use social media these like amazing work around
Say people go through to update people about what's going on
And then we can look at this from the perspective of materiality of Technology and of course
The materiality while you know
the sort of practice of notifying somebody is quite similar the materiality of the technology in which we're doing it with and the affordances of
these
Vast infrastructures is quite quite different. And so one thing that's
sort of easy to see through all of these narratives is that in these more in the historical earthquakes you
Often see people have to work to correct a narrative that's already out there
So it's not that people are finding out about a disaster in you know slower times in
1868 right
If you're in Boston, there may be a telegram
They came to Boston that said hey
There's been an earthquake
but the idea that you could tell your version of the story of what happened and that your version would have to
contend with an existing narrative does seem quite there right now where we have
Everybody's notification to mom might actually come out much quicker than a well-reasoned, you know journalistic account of what happened
And then we can look at this question of
Institutional arrangements
So while money and power of course remain important in all of the information
Orders the site of production of informational Authority really shifts over time
And so if we look at the example of 1868
you really have people looking for an authoritative account of what happened and not finding one whereas in
1989 there's this vast sort of production of a post
Disaster report that apparatus is really in place
In the in the state sees itself is very much responsible for giving an authoritative account at what happened
So if we only look at the sort of much celebrated changes in communication and information
Technologies really miss this important rise of the government as a major force in shaping
disaster response
But as I noted early we have to be concerned with its when the state apparatus adopt capitalist logics of these platform companies
So though the impulse to like call mom after a major earthquake has not changed the ability for private companies to
Potentially collate all the contacts with mom and use them to summarize the effects of an earthquake for example has really important implications
for the constellation of institutions
involved in disaster response and how they imagine a disaster has happened and then decide to deploy aid, so
Disaster informatics really has to account for these shifts in event epistemologies that are related to the affordances of these new material
Technologies, but also these shifts in institutional actors and the activities that they have undertake
So thank you guys so much for listening
Hopefully with plenty of time for questions
Yeah, can you introduce yourself we're a small group can you just introduce yourself to great hi Kyle
so you mentioned I was curious about the institutional arrangements shifting
so the state comes in able to graft a more authoritative response
later on, there's a hundred-year gap I guess but
I guess now it seems like the state is also willing to do that
Are people interested in those reports?
Yeah
Like, do people care about the official state 4000-page document?
Yeah, yeah, okay
so
I mean
I think like the after-action report is probably only interesting to like people like me who are a disaster studies type researchers
however, there's lots and lots of evidence that social media for example that
institutional accounts get the most retweets and
That that's actually changed over the last like ten years is that they are now like the most sort of popular
tweets are from
professional disaster response organizations
When you say institutional accounts do you mean like institutional twitter accounts?
Yeah, sorry, I should have been no like professional design yeah, like professional disaster responders but not tweeting
You know these lengthy reports about what happened, but their immediate tweets after the disaster saying like this is what happened
This is what to do to be safe. Please don't go here
Those are sort of the most widely shared tweets
Yeah, yeah
I guess I'm tagging on a little bit because one of the things that really struck me is that
each population are still combating like bombastic like exaggerations
problems that are occurring like the 1989 and the hundreds and your original letter
overexaggerated let me tell you what happened etc
each generation is trying to deal with the fact that we or whoever is
is overexaggerating it or downplaying it despite the fact that there's this institutional response
Yah, yah
I'm glad that stuck it stuck out to you and it's sort of interesting to consider the different ways in which the playing or the
Down playing happens so in 89 because there's now so in you know during the cold war
We see the passage of like the Stafford Act, which is this act that allows
Allows the federal government to respond to emergencies and sort of easily spend money
So it sort of creates this very different set of incentives for calling something an emergency for that sort of like ontological
Designation this is a disaster because there's all these possible resources that come with it
Whereas like in 1868 people didn't know
You know scientifically where earthquakes came from this hypothesis that circulated was like, you know
it's gas escaping from the earth or it's God or
Earthquake weather was like a really popular and one can sort of see if you were moving from the East Coast and
Most adverse sort of natural phenomena might be preceded by like humidity or a warm front and cold front or something like that
You know, it's stand to reason that you're like, oh well, maybe it was earth, you know people would write about earthquake weather
So you sort of see in these different moments
there's like really different logics around like how you're going to talk about the disaster and whether
you're going to want to downplay it in order to say, you know, again, your investments are safe here or
Hey, we need you federal government to throw all of your resources at us to your help us rebuild
Yeah
you're partly answering my last question I have to run so I'm so sorry
Thank you so much for this by the way
You talked about NIMS, and all the levels of government have to adopt this
so that's like a federally mandated policy that even like a county have to accept this
I'm assuming now what you just said were federal money
Is that correct?
Yeah, I'm that's actually a good question is like what kind of mechanisms are in place to ensure that because it is so
California is kind of interesting because the state emergency management system actually predates NIMS
Because California had sort of developed this innovative system through the 70s and 80s and 90s
So I actually know I I know a lot less about
Say how Washington state has responded to having to do NIMS which might be a very different dynamic where they've had to be
Much more like carrot or stick type approach to getting people to adopt these particular. Oh
I can actually answer that
Yeah, please yeah
Yeah
Right like all the Hazard Mitigation work
Yeah
Yeah
Insert is a cert is huge the Community Emergency Response Teams
And so they do like local trainings and yeah
Right but the very important thing to understand is that at the federal
Yeah
It's not a matter of you have to do this it's a matter of we want to do this
because that's how we get our support
that in the event of a major disaster there's no way that Washington state on their own can recover insure
So, a lot of the purpose of doing preparedness is, I mean there's gonna be deaths anyways but
the idea is how quickly can we respond and get back on our feet economically?
After a major disaster
and what's another interesting thing to know about the history of how and why LA group was because of the disaster in San Fransisco
A lot of people migrated away because the recovery was just no-existant at that point
That's right
Ya LA benefited hugely from the 1906 earthquake, yeah
A lot of cities benefit from disasters, right?
Fires yeah, yeah. Thank you. Take care of good questions. Yes
Yeah, yeah
If you just google AAR
Yeah
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that these reports get wide rating
There. Yeah, they're usually very well-written and well researched. Oh
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah
Yeah, and of course like yeah climate change issues are also weighing heavily on people near Bainbridge and stuff like that
Yeah
So I love that this is comparing one area, that's great I love
being able to see it over time but
I think, I don't know, for me it's like
It's sort of like our undergraduate students of like "Oh those first two cases are way in the past"
but in my mind 1989 isn't that long ago
I know it's a few years ago but I remember watching it
Yeah I wanted to hear a little bit more from you about what happens between
89 and the current day
In terms of, I mean the examples you're pulling from were like wildfire and etc.
and you already spoke about how social media comes into play
telecom comes into play
Yeah, 1996 Telecommunications
911 is like in the 9/11 report
So I wanted to hear like 9/11 report
Katrina, like what happened in between
to get to this now
Okay
So, let's see at this state level the 1994 Northridge earthquake is also sort of very significant and like this
Is like the Northern California book and maybe if I live long enough? All right, the Southern California version of this book, so
Northridge is really important on a state level
This happens in October which is you know
It's probably off the top of your head very close to the fall of the Berlin Wall
So we're basically seeing it like this is sort of like the last vestiges of Cold War era disaster planning, which really does
Envision like this sort of like white middle-class
Nuclear family in a very sort of problematic way in its disaster planning
so
after
Hurricane Andrew in 1992
the Northridge earthquake
and you know the sort of fall of the Berlin Wall the end of this sort of Cold War era of disaster planning and
then Bill Clinton comes into office and
Appoints this guy DeWitt. I can't remember his first name
And they're the ones who really start doing actually a lot of this community-based planning
So the community planning tradition comes out of civil defense in the Cold War and it's sort of like all of these
Civil defense offices that have opened up around the u.s. And done all of this kind of like local planning around
nuclear disaster response don't really know what to do and they sort of get swept up in some sense into more natural disaster planning and
Then once like FEMA gets established in 79 that falls away a little bit that more community focus and really comes back during the Clinton
era
Where there's sort of a much more local
push to educate local disaster managers
and then of course 9/11 is like this huge overhaul where FEMA gets subsumed into DHS and so
so there's sort of like these different waves of FEMA's existence where FEMA or emergency offices are outside of
Whoever is worried about homeland security versus when they're inside. So once FEMA got subsumed again into DHS, my sense is that they're
These disaster plans sort of meet encompass terrorist attacks and all of these other types
you know first-person shooter events and all these other types of sort of events and
Some of the focus gets pulled away from in California, for example, earthquake mitigation and some of that funding gets pulled away
and so you have
the 9/11 report and the Patriot Act and all of these sort of security-oriented foci that follow
I think
Show up very much in the response to Hurricane Katrina, which is sort of
so catastrophic
And you know within the disaster studies community there's this debate was whether Katrina was like so catastrophic
Nobody could ever plan for it or whether it really highlighted. What a spectacular failure this whole enterprise has been
And then so after Katrina, you see the rise NIMS. I think it's adopted on a national level maybe in 2007
Although it's been in the works for a while
So you see the rise of NIMS and this more centralized approach
to
how you're gonna organize disaster response, but also during the Obama era again this like return to
Funding certs and more neighborhood programs and things like that
So that would be my like very very high level outline of like stuff that happened
That's exactly what I wanted just cause it was like
Wow like some big things must have happened
Yeah, yeah
Yeah. Yeah, no and I sort of chose to write the book in a way
That doesn't it doesn't do this sort of broad sweep of history
but these like really close looks at information practices in these really specific moments, but you sort of lose that
you know the ability to talk in a lot of detail about the changes that happen in between
I'm gonna pick up on this same thread of I love the
comparative nature of a
Similar place across time. Yeah, I wonder if you could say maybe a little bit about how moving
To potentially different destinations at the same time. Yeah
impacts your sort of theory and elaboration of event epistemology
Yeah, because we would think of epistemologies as being different to places right we would think of like a Western politics versus geologic success
So what might that do are like how would that shape your that's like a kind of minor that is more
My next project is to sort of do a more
regional look at that I can say it would be my colleague Scott miles and I
Did a workshop recently
Called seismic cultures around the Pacific Rim where we were like sort of trying to get at some of these questions
I mean obviously not everybody was focused on the sort of epistemic issues as I was
But I think it certainly involves
Sort of like a robust
theorizing about the different
Institutions involved in a sort of general enough way that you could look at it in different say national contexts or different regional context
even thinking the difference between
Washington State Oregon in California is actually like pretty interesting to think about today so, California
I mean frankly shocking for me to move here
Because to me it was like we're moving to another place with seismic activity
but there just isn't wasn't and I think m9 has actually done a lot to change this over the time that I've lived here, but
There wasn't quite as a robust
amount of
Information or sort of public knowledge about earthquakes when I moved here
So like I remember talking to a realtor and being like just don't show me a brick house
I'm not gonna live in a brick house in a seismically active area
Because anyway, and so she you know, and she was like, well it why you know, that seems ridiculous
So I think like you can even sort of think about the types of educational resources and institutions that are available. So in Northern, California
You have one of USGS' hubs in Menlo Park, and they do a lot of public education there
in Southern California, there's this Institute called SCEC
Southern California earthquakes
Commission
It's a big research organization that so there are the people who started
They sort of did the first version of what's now Cascadia rising up here
They did. I don't remember what it's called. Oh the great shakeout in Southern, California
So they've been really innovative and they're sort of like reaching out to the public
and then up here, you know, there's these interesting comparisons between Oregon and
In Washington and how they do
Disaster preparedness and management for example in like thinking about a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami evacuation
Here there's been more work to build vertical evacuation
sites
In Oregon, there's been sort of different approaches to considering tsunami evacuation
So I think it's yeah, there's sort of a number of different ways that you can slice it and they're all really interesting
And yeah, good question
Yeah
I'm currently doing a research project on seismic culture
Annex of any ethnographic lens trying to understand kind of what where the uses of this word. What does it mean?
the uses of seismic culture
That's interesting. It's been incredibly interesting because I'm who does who say I have a lit review?
but so I've been look we thought that we made it up actually and it's funny because I
thought that I had as well
I started finding more and more incidents of this use, you know, where the workshop that you guys. Did. You wrote the whole thing?
Yeah. Yeah, and so that's one of the yeah most
I've been finding it in relation to architecture. Yeah, so it's talked a lot about new vernacular. Yeah
Yeah, I was just curious to hear you talk more about
When you were talking about earthquake public. Yeah, just what how you define that and what that looks like and where that exists
in the research that you've done
Yeah, so
So as I said, I'm drawing on this concept of issue public some thinking, you know
Public's are always political formations and there can sort of be you know doubt that
disasters are absolutely political projects and the sort of project of putting together a narrative and
What narrative dominates about a disaster is you know, absolutely a political problem
So and I will say I sort of differ from other folks in this space who have tried to use like
Crowd or something like that as a way of talking about groups of people
who are
you know talking about disasters and I'm like
I think we need like to be more explicit about the fact that in the ways. We talk about disaster is political
Even calling it a disaster as as I noted before a sort of political thing. So I'm definitely drawing on
Marys as well and her sort of idea of material public's and that public's can be sort of knitted together
Around you know, she has this idea that people are like turning on and off light switches or using eco-home devices
And that in being you know in these activities that makes them part of an issue public
And so one of the arguments in my book is definitely and I'm happy to like share my introduction which is lots and lots more
literature insights than what I'm saying right now, but
yeah, so one of the ideas that I'm trying to
argue for is that these public information infrastructures essentially sort of like bringing these publics into being by
By their they sort of produce publics
By both their use in the sort of practices associated with their ongoing production
and again, I'm sort of drawing on this SDS notion of infrastructures as being
Processes not so much like things out there if that makes sense. Is that helpful? Yeah. Okay. I'm happy to talk more about
Technical pieces that thank you so much for coming Matt. Yeah. Take care of have everyday
Any other questions, yeah
I have a question
The version throttling case puzzles me
Isn't it awful?
I don't understand, I mean the bad PR that they get from that seems to like it would
Far outweigh any
extra money that they get from
The increased costs I would agree. So what's going on there cause I think compared to the yeah
I forget what's the first or the second case where the US Postal Service was sending a mail for free on
Any paper and seems like the way the PR move to make yes. Yes, I would agree with that
I don't have a great answer for that and because that's like relatively recent
I don't in write about it in my book, but
But I'm working on a paper with another seismic culture researcher Beth Reddy who works in Mexico
Where we're sort of trying to work through like yeah, the paradise fires and what happened at the back end of that
so I will have a good answer for that question and hopefully
but I
mean what I imagine is that so there's all these questions around like spectrum allocation and
How spectrum is going to be allocated for like emergency
response and other things and I
Wonder if it sort of fits into like that debate and also this is all around, you know, Net-neutrality's repeal
It's also sort of happening around this time. So I'm like wondering if that has something to do with it
So those are the questions that are in my mind, but I really don't have answers
and then the other question I had, I didn't hear anything about
Shortwave radio does that come into play at all? Because I know there's a whole community. Yeah
that's involved in it
Who think of themselves as sort of disaster responders, yeah. Yeah, I
Mean like I so I when I was doing research for my dissertation
I spent some time hanging out with like ham radio people in the East Bay in California and like
You know going to some of their demos where they're trying to like send messages as far as possible and yet they certainly see themselves
As being like people who are gonna be able to communicate when everything else
fails
Which doesn't seem unreasonable
But they didn't come into any of this
Yeah stories that I was telling
But ya know they are like a very very interesting group
I feel like I wonder if Kristina Dunbar Hester has something to say about that cuz she's done all that stuff around like
low power radio
community networks that are doing that that's probably one the teams
cause they were divided into like medical team
vulnerable populations
and Ham radio is part of the communications
and we actually plan the assumption that we're not going to have the towers for cell phone
Communication we're making the assumption that there will be no way to communicate except for the old school way of running messages
Via bicycle and foot. Yeah
ham radio, things like that
To seem like historically how has that been used has it? I mean, it's me is it more
Like it does it have to be such the disaster has to be so widespread
Yeah
that
Yeah
Yeah, you sure need to see what historically
if it has been used
That was another point. I wanted to bring up and
We would you can see that the advent of tech has changed dramatically with how information flow happens
Yeah, how it becomes from out of the government hands to now more flat to people the people spreading of information
as opposed to back in the day when you didn't have the technology
information was so still to get from the east to the west coast, right?
but the thing is now, one of the things that I wanted to bring up was that
These tech companies are
like their Google X programs things that are not really of the public but they are doing a lot of research in terms of
different ways to keep communication going in the event of desert disasters to include things like
Deploying these balloons as a disaster
Works ya know. There's a lot of research in the space including by like lots of people on campus here
I mean one point I do want to make is I wouldn't I
I don't necessarily like to think of things as like faster and slower like in it, you know
It's trying to sort of make this point in 1868
It wasn't necessarily that cross-country communication would have been faster. It's more like the bandwidth would have been quite different
and the ability to access it for
For the general population would have been quite different
But ya know there's a ton of new
Interesting research going on around use of drones and balloons and mesh networks and other sorts of projects
One thing I think that I end up talking to a lot of student groups who like build these things
and one thing I try to underscore to them is that
Yes
Fortunate people like us will be adversely affected by a disaster. However, folks who live in
extremely marginalized
spaces who live in
poor housing poor quality housing or don't have housing at all are going to suffer much much much more and their problems aren't going to
Be ones of you know communication
Necessarily they're going to be real
Really sort of serious access to clean water and things like that. So I
Well, I you know find these sort of technology idea is really interesting and it'll be interesting to see if and when they really get
Used on a grand scale. I also really worry that we like
By sort of focusing on the problems of like middle-class people that we're going to sort of further
Marginalize people who you know already are going to have much much much harder time after these major events, so
I think that's another advantage of these community programs though
because that's actually a specific team we have dedicated to vulnerable populations
people who have physical disabilities or people with fixed income, elderly
To be able to identify and to know who your neighbors are and then even like
Housing senior housing complex
We have teamed up with a condo
Association so that they're they're paired up so that their responsibility would say make sure the third day their neighbors
Okay that they go over to this to help because they only know
It's going to be challenged because the staff the minimal staff is no that's right able to take care. That's right
and they're not necessarily gonna be able to make it in
Yeah, and most of the research actually about these sort of community groups is that one of the sort of
Biggest benefits is that people actually get to know the people in their community by participating in it. So it's not even necessarily like
things are gonna go according to plan but it's much more that you
You know who to look for
Yeah, you know who to look for and you know
Who's gonna have trouble and that those people are sort of visible in new ways. Yeah, that sounds really awesome
and we're hoping that that model gets replicated too
and I see it being replicated on other island communities but I don't know what it's like here in Seattle
Yeah, we've done like conferences with Vashon Island Medical Reserve Corps
Very cool, that's a super interesting
Oh
you mentioned there was a follow-up study that you were gonna do after this
Gosh oh
In my response to Nick's question? Yeah. Yeah. No
Well, I think I'm still sort of like conceptualizing what that's gonna look like
So it'll probably be like a sort of many year affair
But and hoping to yeah, I think through some of what he's talking about more comparative regional
project
Yeah
Yeah
All right, well, thanks guys thank you so much for being inside on a beautiful day
