paper for Prof. Moses

Running Head: Information Technology And Crises 1

Running Head: Information Technology And Crises 5

Information technology and crises

Wilson Li

Tienan Xu

Yili Li

Lizhe Tang

Information technology and crises

A crisis or disaster refers to a situation where there is an interruption of the economic, social, cultural and even political life of a place. It is known that disasters may strike both developed and developing countries and can cause major destruction and suffering to the people of disaster hit countries. Natural disasters that may hit a nation involve floods, droughts, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes and many others. Human caused disasters and the other hand, involve terrorist attacks, the spread of viral diseases l, nuclear and chemical crises, war and many more (Housel, 2004).

Although it is not possible to completely avoid disasters, but their impacts may be minimized greatly by ensuring there is awareness about a potential or ongoing disaster. This is because disaster management may be achieved by the use of Information Technology based disaster preparedness and disaster management systems like geographic information systems and social media (Comfort, 2003).

In addition, advances in the field of information technology and communication technologies have made it possible for crisis situation to be seen and followed everywhere in the world through the use of social media. Some examples of social media include blogs, Facebook, twitter, use of wikis, YouTube channels, linked in and online discussion forums. The management of information about a crisis or disaster is therefore is very critical both during and after the crisis situation. This is because the management of crisis information may have an impact on how the crisis situation will be handled (Deming, 2006).

In the last few years use of social media has played a major role in the management of emergencies and disaster situations. Social media have continued to rank highly as the top sources of information about emergency situations all over the globe. Social media have been used by people to warn others about the unsafe situations caused by disasters, to send information of one’s wellbeing in times of disaster and also to help raise funds so as to handle a disaster situation. Examples of situations where people have used information technology to help manage a disaster situation include the South Carolina fires in the United States where people used Google maps to assess the extent to which the fires had spread and shared this information to help evacuate those affected (Khosrow-Pour, 2005).

I claim it is important that information about a disaster or emergency to be reliable to avoid more adverse effects of the situation. The information should be certain and should be from trustworthy sources. Conflicting information should also be avoided to avoid confusion. During the Israeli –Lebanon conflict in 2006, sharing of credible and certain information about the war ensured that trust was maintained among the citizens. The people constantly monitored information through the internet as the government shared updates about the situation and how they were supposed to act. However, in the war in Iraq, the trust among the citizens continued to decline during the war because the information sharing was limited and untrustworthy. The citizens were fed with the information that the government wanted them to leave people uninformed about the war crisis. All the information available to them was from the government’s point of view and not the real situation on the ground (Hagar, 2013).

During the foot and mouth disease outbreak in the United Kingdom, lack of information led to mismanagement of the crisis by the authorities. In trying to handle the crisis, farmers were locked in their farms and people were not allowed into these forms. The farmers were not given information on how to handle the situation since they were kept in the dark by the government. Instead of using information technology the government sought to use mail to disseminate information to the farmers, which usually took too long making the situation even worse. It was only when they adopted the internet and a local community network, which was called Pentalk, that they were able to share information effectively with other local farmers and farmers living abroad and had experienced the same epidemic. Using technology to obtain information allowed sharing of timely and accurate information that helped solve the crisis caused by the disease (Hagar, 2013).

Also, during the Southern California wildfires use of information technology, particularly the use of social media helped greatly to manage the disaster. Research conducted on this crisis indicated that during the disaster, a lot of people used information portals and websites to look for their loved ones. Few people used mobile phones to try and reach their loved ones (Hagar, 2013).

Use of information technology may also lead to the development of complex disaster situations like the chain of protests against government in Arab countries like Egypt, Libya and Syria. Many of the uprisings were greatly influenced by the use of social media such as Facebook, social network sites and video sharing sites like YouTube. The Iranian uprising was at some point referred to as the ‘twitter revolution’ indicating it was greatly influenced by the use of social media (Hagar, 2013).

Conclusion

Use of information technology has continued to help in the management of disasters and emergency situations all over the world. People are continually embracing the use social media and other forms of information technology as their sources of information. This therefore means that today’s information technology is the most reliable medium to pass information about disasters since it is timely and efficient (Housel, 2004).

You have some interesting information and I like the way you are beginning to let your voices come through in the text i.e. interpret information rather than just summarize and report. I am wondering why you haven’t sythnesized the three studies we looked at in class into this information. Let me know if you are not clear about the guidelines for the assignment.

Your next step is to focus and re-organize the ideas you have into clear well developed and supported paragraphs that focus on one main idea that is supported by the studies. See the review worksheet to help you do this. Try to follow the steps and format your paper according to the outline suggested. Use the example paragraphs to help you decide where/how to organize the information you have.

References Comfort, L. K. (2003). Complexity, information technology, and crisis management. California: Institute of Governmental Studie. Deming, W. E. (2006). Out of the crisis. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering. Hagar, C. (2013). Crisis information management : communication and technologies. Oxford, UK: Chandos Pub. Housel, T. J. (2004). Information technology and crisis management. Greenwich: JAI press. Khosrow-Pour, M. (2005). Pitfalls and triumphs of information technology management. Hershey: Idea Group Pub.

Make sure you list your references accurately – i.e. don’t use bullets. You also need to indent the text underneath the first line i.e. create a ‘hanging indent’. You don’t want to lose marks on incorrect referencing.