Governing and societal media for building resilience: A sociocybernetic study of the disaster recovery in Japan

Abstract

How can society deal with a severe disaster that entails wide-ranging societal problems? This article aims to elaborate a sociocybernetic approach to describe and improve collective efforts which are tackling such problems. First, a concept of ‘governing’ will be introduced to describe efforts of not only public actors but also private actors. A case study of recovery efforts which were made in response to the large-scale disasters in 1995 and 2011 in Japan shows that governing can and needs to be empowered by the media. Focusing on one disaster-hit area in Japan, this article examines in what way and to what extent the media (the mass media and the Internet) supported local non-profit organizations (NPOs) working for their communities. The supportive use of the media will be defined as ‘societal media’. Making use of these key terms (governing and societal media), this article concludes that combining a variety of efforts with the supportive use of media is an essential component of building resilience in contemporary society.