Social Media Seamsters

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Abstract
This paper examines social media use after a tragic disaster in a rural community in the USA--the 2014 Oso Landslide. Drawing upon interviews with community members and digital traces from multiple platforms, we explore how affected locals, government responders and journalists utilized a broad range of social media in their work-assembling different platforms to meet the information needs of their audiences. We borrow the analytical lens of stitching suggested by Vertesi, which allows us to see where these infrastructural alignments are seamless vs. seamful-highlighting some of the emergent and persistent challenges for those responding to disasters with and through social media. We demonstrate how this work is extremely dynamic, as the technical affordances of these platforms and the evolving practices of users shape how crisis communication occurs. Simultaneously, the pervasive and in some places institutionalized use of these platforms across a wide range of local actors suggests they are performing as critical infrastructure during crisis response. This raises questions of what it means to have so much local crisis information work occurring through platforms that mediate from a distance.

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