Hostname: page-component-669899f699-qzcqf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-29T19:49:09.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘My Teacher Told me “Toowoomba will Never Flood”’: Regional Community Uses of Facebook During the 2011 Queensland Floods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2013

Kelly McWilliam
Kelly McWilliam*
Affiliation:
[email protected]
Get access

Extract

Regional Queensland and social media are not standard bedfellows in studies of Australian media use. Yet regional community responses to recent natural disasters on Facebook in particular warrant further investigation. Indeed, while the increasing use of social media by government organisations during disasters and other crises is by now well documented, the comparative surge in community uses — and particularly regional community uses — has received considerably less attention. This article is broadly interested in regional Queensland uses of Facebook during the 2011 Queensland floods, specifically the ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info Page’ (https://www.facebook.com/TmbaLockyerFloods?fref=ts 10 January 2011). Drawing on an interview with the page's creator, I consider both the speed and apparent efficacy of the page as a tool of grassroots (or unofficial) crisis communication, partly compared with its most obvious official counterpart, the Toowoomba Regional Council's Facebook page. Ultimately, I argue that the ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info Page’ offers an emphatically more useful model of social media-based crisis communication from which others might draw.

Type
Articles
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , June 2013 , pp. 86 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

BMT 2011. Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry: technical report on the Toowoomba flood of 10 January 2011, April, http://www.floodcommission.qld.gov.au.Google Scholar
Bruns, Axel, Burgess, Jean, Crawford, Kate and Shaw, Frances 2012. #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: crisis communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods. Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology.Google Scholar
Bryant, Nick 2011. ‘Australia floods: 72 missing and at least eight dead’, BBC News, 10 January, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12149921.Google Scholar
Bureau of Meteorology 2011. ‘Flood summary for Toowoomba, January 2011’, http://www.bom.gov.au.Google Scholar
‘City downpour sparks flash floods’ 2011. The Chronicle [Toowoomba], 10 January, http://www.thechronicle.com.au.Google Scholar
Crowe, Adam 2011. ‘The social media manifesto: a comprehensive review of the impact of social media on emergency management’, Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning 5, 1: 409–20.Google ScholarPubMed
‘Eight dead, 72 missing in Australian flash floods’ 2011. Dawn.com World News, 11 January, http://dawn.com/2011/01/11/eight-dead-72-missing-in-australian-flash-floodsGoogle Scholar
Facebook page for ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood 15 Photos & Info Page’ 2011. 10th January 2011, https://www.facebook.com/TmbaLockyerFloods?fref=ts.Google Scholar
‘Facebook and Twitter key for Toowoomba and Queensland flood information’ 2011. Daily Telegraph, 11 January, http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au.Google Scholar
Foley, Meraiah 2011. ‘8 die from latest flooding in Australia’, New York Times, 10 January, http://www.nytimes.com.Google Scholar
Gearing, Amanda 2011. ‘Warning signs to disaster’, Crikey, 10 February, http://www.crikey.com.au.Google Scholar
Hagar, Chris 2010. ‘Crisis informatics’, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 36, 5: 10–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanna, Noel 2011. ‘Wettest day for Toowoomba since devastating January floods’, Weatherzone, 7 February, http://www.weatherzone.com.au.Google Scholar
Khazan, Olga 2013. ‘The entire world is increasingly using Facebook’, Washington Post, 4 January, http://www.washingtonpost.com.Google Scholar
Landsbergen, David 2010. ‘Government as part of the revolution: using social media to achieve public goals’, Electronic Journal of e-Government 8, 2: 134–46.Google Scholar
Magro, Michael 2012. ‘A review of social media use in e-government’, Administrative Sciences 2: 148–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McWilliam, Kelly 2011. Interview with ‘Susy’, creator of ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info’ Facebook page. Email correspondence, 1 April.Google Scholar
Palen, Leysia and Liu, Sophia 2007. ‘Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation’, in CHI 2007 Proceedings: Emergency Action, http://www.takebay.net/data/chi07/docs/p727.pdf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palen, Leysia, Vieweg, Sarah, Sutton, Jeannette, Liu, Sophia B. and Hughes, Amanda 2007. ‘Crisis informatics: studying crisis in a networked world’, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on E-Social Science, Ann Arbor, MI.Google Scholar
Queensland Flood Commission Inquiry, Transcript — Day 8, 19 April 2011, http://www.floodcommission.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/5731/2011-04-19-QFCI-Day-8-Toowoomba.pdf.Google Scholar
Queensland Police Service 2011. Disaster management and social media—a case study. Brisbane: Queensland Police Service, http://www.police.qld.gov.au/Resources/Internet/services/reportsPublications/documents/QPSSocialMediaCaseStudy.pdf.Google Scholar
Ryan, Barb and Matheson, Amalia 2010. ‘Significance of communication in emergency management’, The Australian Journal of Emergency Management 25, 1: 54–7.Google Scholar
‘Toowoomba torrent no one knew was coming’ 2011. The Australian, 11 January, http://www.theaustralian.com.au.Google Scholar
Ulmer, Robert, Sellnow, Timothy and Seeger, Matthew 2011. Effective crisis communication: moving from crisis to opportunity, 2nd ed.London: Sage.Google Scholar
Vieweg, Sarah 2009. ‘Technology-mediated social participation in mass emergencies’. Position paper for the iParticipate Workshop, http://www.tmsp.umd.edu.Google Scholar
Yates, Dave and Paquette, S. 2011. ‘Emergency knowledge management and social media technologies: a case study of the 2010 Haitian earthquake’, International Journal of Information Management 31: 6–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
‘Warnings were hours late for thousands’ 2011. Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January, http://www.smh.com.au.Google Scholar
Weatherzone 2011. Website, http://www.weatherzone.com.au.Google Scholar