Resilience 2.0: social media use and (self-)care during the 2011 Norway attacks

Abstract

Departing from the understanding that resilience is a technique of self-organization during emergencies, this article provides a study on the way in which the use of social media influenced and engendered societal resilience practices during the 2011 Norway attacks. It builds on the concepts of governmentality and mediality to discuss how the interplay between social media and its users created new forms of self-initiated and mediated emergency governance. Empirically, it draws on material from 20 in-depth interviews with Norwegians who explained and reflected upon their social media use during the attacks. The article presents an overview of the different functions that social media assumed in the process of dealing with the attacks and discusses these vis-à-vis their related challenges. It draws conclusions about the way in which resilience practices and the resilient subject are influenced by the networked character of 2.0 technologies.

Keywords

emergency management mediality networks Norway attacks resilience self-governance social media

Introduction

Military police, ambulances etc on the scene #osloexplosion. (hilango)¹

Technology has long been an integral part of emergency management. The incorporation of the Internet into resilience practices, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Beyond the use of static webpages, social media – often referred to as 2.0 technologies – allow users to interact, collaborate and become creators of user-generated content. Communication and networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, are by now an important medium for producing and accessing information about emergencies. Studying the reactions to the 2011 Norway attacks as a case in point, this article asks, How are social media appropriated for dealing with emergencies? And what does this shift toward social networks imply? Resilience itself – often described as the ability to deal with adversity (cf. Garmezy, 1990) – is not taken as a given capacity that is either enhanced or inhibited by social media use. Instead, the article explores how the multiple and diverse processes following emergencies are to an increasing extent including social networking sites. It studies how average social media users in Oslo have appropriated Facebook and Twitter for dealing with the terrorist attack conducted by Anders Behring Breivik on the 22nd of July 2011, when a car bomb in the Oslo government quarter killed 8 people and a subsequent shooting at a worker’s youth league summer camp on Utøya Island claimed 69 lives. The way in which social media have been utilized during and after these attacks, the article argues, is a specific expression of mediated and self-initiated governance of emergencies that resonates with resilience thinking. How this form of resilience governance came about can in many ways be attributed to the interplay between 2.0 technologies and the (resilient) subject that influence each other in the process.

The article’s findings are based on 20 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, which were designed to explore what kind of functions social networking sites (Facebook) and microblogs (Twitter) fulfilled during the emergency situation and its aftermath, as well as the challenges connected to the use of social media. The interviews were organized in four blocks: first, the interviewee’s general use of social media; second, the specific online experience on the 22nd of July; third, the different purposes of social media use in the aftermath of the attacks including topics, groups, and pictures; and finally, the interviewee’s own view on his or her social media experience including expressions of emotions, values, and opinions. The interviews were targeted at people between the age of 18 and 31 years² and included men and women, both with and without migration background. The interviewees were selected through a snowballing sample and included social media users who lived in Oslo at the time of the attacks and were either present in the city or traveling. More than half of the interviews were conducted in English, and the others were translated from Norwegian for the purposes of the analysis.³ The transcriptions were coded using over 150 different theme clusters that were developed inductively from the material.

The following part introduces the theoretical approach of this article. It situates the use of social media for dealing with emergencies in the larger context of self-care and self-initiated governance. Drawing on the concept of mediality, it illustrates that the constitution of self-caring subjects is closely intertwined with the character of the infrastructure that is being used to express (self-)care. The third part will then explore the concrete examples of how social media have been appropriated to deal with the 2011 Norway attacks and points to the diverse manifestations of self-care that emerged from that use. This empirical material is discussed in the final part, which argues that the appropriation of social media for resilience practices not only generates mediated forms of resilience but draws attention to an often under-analyzed aspect in this context, namely, the way in which the networked character of social media influences the emergence of resilience practices and resilient subjects.

Social media use during emergencies – the rise of mediated self-governance?

Communicating about, managing and dealing with emergencies, are of course never enabled through social media only. However, as online communication increases, the role social media play for such incidents increases, too (cf. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), 2013). Seven out of 20 interviewees state that social media were one of their initial points of contact with the Norway attacks. Such trends have been discussed academically in terms of social media’s value for crowdsourcing information during disasters (Heinzelmann et al., 2011), to process visual information into maps (Sjöberg et al., 2013), to measure vulnerability (Birkmann, 2006), to organize emergency relief, to manage knowledge, or to utilize circulated information to engender resilience (Keim and Noji, 2011; Purohit et al., 2014; Yates and Paquette, 2011). Within this debate, scholars have discussed ethical frameworks for the use of big data to engender resilience (Crawford et al., 2013), challenges related to the veracity and validity of circulating information (Meier, 2014; Popoola et al., 2013), and the rise of cyber-humanitarianism altogether (Duffield, 2013). The majority of the academic literature on the use of social media for emergency management and resilience, however, explores such trends with considerable optimism and with the intent to identify opportunities for exploitation. What kind of functions social media fulfill during emergencies and what this integration of networked technologies into emergency management processes implies for the sociology of resilience is currently under-discussed. The aim of this article is thus not to assess whether the use of social media is constructive of or detrimental for resilience practices. Rather, it aims to understand what different roles social media fulfill during emergencies and discusses what these developments entail for resilience practices and the conceptualization of the resilient subject.

In order to investigate the connection between resilience and social media use during emergencies, it is instructive to trace how resilience has lately been theorized and how the use of 2.0 technologies for emergency management relates to that. Resilience thinking characteristically promotes self-organized crisis response (cf. Adger, 2003). While socio-ecologists refer to the self-organizational capacities of systems, psychologists refer to the ability of subjects to deal with adversity through adaptation (Luthar et al., 2000). The notion of resilience was lately adopted into security policies as a form of re-organization after emergencies without obtaining ‘resources from the outside’ (Longstaff et al., 2010: 7). All of these resilience conceptualizations refer to the necessity of self-care and the responsibilization of the individual that re-instantiates its own security. Resilience is thus an act of self-care that draws upon peoples’ self-governing capabilities, which becomes particularly apparent when dealing with emergencies. During emergencies, the resilient subject uses its calculating and rationalizing abilities to calibrate its own needs for security, and its entrepreneurship to overcome adversity.

In that sense, resilience can be considered an instance of neoliberal governmentality, the rationality and practice of governing that among other things emphasizes the self-governing capabilities of the subject. Not only does the subject’s behavior enable specific forms of governance, for example, by sharing information about itself, but it takes on an active role in caring for its own wellbeing (Dean, 1999; Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1996, 1999). Governmentality is thus a useful lens to understand the broader development in which social media use for emergency management can be placed, especially when we explore how mediated and networked forms of self-care come about. As Berry (2012) notes, self-governance or self-care is manifested in different acts of individual consumption that follow a specific purpose, while this consumption is often facilitated through a specific infrastructure. As our lives are increasingly enmeshed with online networks, we can now witness how social media are appropriated as one of many infrastructures that are being used to share information about emergencies, in some cases with the deliberate intention to cope with and manage urgent situations.

In performing acts of self-governance, social media users rise as particular kinds of subjects (cf. Foucault, 2010; Schecter 2010). They are not only self-caring, self-organizing, emergency-managing subjects, but their way of becoming particular subjects is enmeshed with 2.0 technologies. The specifics of becoming a self-caring subject are thus influenced by the character of the infrastructure that is used to perform self-caring practices (cf. Latour, 2005). It means that the infrastructure, here social media, influences the way in which the subject, the care, and the self-care comes about. That also becomes evident in the case study of this article: many of the emergency management functions that social media enabled during the Norway attacks could only emerge because the infrastructure was already deeply embedded in the users’ everyday lives. Not only did users attribute additional functions to social media by using them for particular purposes, but the infrastructure’s networked character also formed the emergence of these practices. The medium not only influenced the way in which knowledge about the emergency was accessed, produced, and reproduced but it also shaped the way in which users performed acts of self-care.

The notion of mediality (Bolter and Grusin, 1996; Grusin, 2010) further conceptualizes this form of mediated (self-)governance. Most of Grusin’s work explores the various forms through which media enable interactions between people with the aim of generating data that can be mined to effectively govern and discipline populations (Anti-thesis, 2010). Mediality is then a mode of governing and administrating that mobilizes the production and circulation of information through everyday media-practices. Such modes of governing become all the more significant in societies where media and technologies of any kind play an increasingly central role. Mediality, however, not only refers to the way in which governments police and discipline populations, but the increasingly interactive character of media engenders modes of self-governing that can be stimulated and instrumentalized either by governments or by the populace itself, meaning these forms of governance can take place ‘within and outside the networks of state power’ (Grusin, 2010: 75). It is precisely in this notion of mediated self-governance where the idea of resilient self-organization and the use of 2.0 technologies for emergency management meet. It is within the use of social media where optimists see the opportunity to expedite self-governance during emergencies that is conducive to resilience. In addition to that, social media are not only a place where useful information is circulated but where emotions are expressed and dealt with. We shall see in the case study below that mediated self-governance entails much positive potential for dealing with emotions. It is important not to dismiss, however, that a moment of collective affect can be also exploited and manipulated to press for a specific political agenda or to present a specific account of the unfolding situation, which is Grusin’s (2010) main critique of the way in which media are used to affectively govern populations.

The concept of resilience in general and the use of technology to engender self-governance in specific have been subject to further criticism. While resilience policies promote a positive framing of self-organization, resilience has also been criticized for its proximity to neoliberal governance (cf. Joseph, 2013; Zebrowski, 2009). Resilience would be an expression of a subject that is responsibilized by the state and, following neoliberal market logics, requested to adapt to emergencies on its own account. Vis-a-vis the case discussed below, this criticism needs to be put into perspective. The way in which social media have been used to deal with the 2011 Norway attacks differs from prevalent examples of neoliberal governance in two ways. First, the fact that social media have been appropriated for emergency management is not directly caused by governments that are ‘pushing for a certain agenda’ (Joseph, 2013: 44). The form of self-governance described and discussed here is not (yet) the product of a social media-initiative launched by the Norwegian government. It is – if at all – only an indirect result of a general move to outsource responsibility. As we shall see, the examples given below are rather instances of (self-)care that have grown out of a collective experience and that were enabled through networked infrastructure. To what extent this specific behavior could be an expression of a more deep-seated neoliberal culture or mentality is debatable. Second, the instance of (self-)care discussed here is also broader than its original meaning. It refers to individuals taking initiative, not only for their own but also for each other’s wellbeing.

Finally, if social media are to an increasing extent integrated into resilience practices, another critical argument lies in the default translation of information about emergencies into digital data that can be traced, synthesized, measured, and subjected to algorithmic analysis (Amoore, 2009). In the context of an emergency, digitized information about emergencies provides knowledge in the form of patterns: of behavior, of hubs of action, processes over time, movements of people and goods, of access to safe and dangerous areas. In the very sense of mediality and governmentality, such information can and will be incorporated into new practices of governance which seek to measure and engender resilience. As a result, resilience metrics will rise as one form of computed reasoning about resilience that influences the why and how of self-care. This development has been criticized as the facilitation of self-organization from a ‘control room’ (Duffield, 2013).

While this argument about the digital needs to be acknowledged as a valid and important one, we shall see that the empirical material of this article suggests the highlighting of a different aspect: the influence of the network. Social media are different from other digital media, as, for example, short messaging service (SMS) and static websites, precisely because they are networked. In the same way is the subject that rises from these practices, more than a subject that is defined through digital data. It also comes into existence through a network. It is this networked aspect of social media that the article seeks to bring back into the critical discussion on the technology-resilience nexus. That is why the case study not only illustrates a particular mediated experience of the Norway attacks and explores what kind of forms mediated resilience can take but it also draws attention to the granularity of digital networks, the discussion of which needs to include more facets than the digital. Showing that 2.0 technologies have more and less obvious affordances (Gibson, 1977), the subsequent part will introduce the diverse functions and challenges that social media fulfilled in terms of resilience and reflect about the role that the networked character of social media played for the emergence of (self-)care.

Social media use during the Norway attacks: functions and challenges

So it was this insane activity. There was a post every 30, 40 seconds on the same thing. (11)⁴

After having heard of the attack, most interviewees refer to a moment of disbelief or confusion. They describe the situation as both surreal but also filled with a worried kind of curiosity. This emotional status was counteracted with the attempt to access as much information, as soon as possible. In that moment, social media were not only consistently co-used with other media, but online newspapers and the Norwegian national broadcasting service were at times cited as the most important source of information. Most interviewees describe, however, that the selection of the medium was dependent on the purpose of its use. In general, the interviewees showed a tendency to access traditional online newspapers for facts, Twitter for analysis, and Facebook for personal statements, as well as the expression of emotions and interactive processes. The interactive aspects of dealing with the attacks were thus clearly ascribed to social media, the main focus of the article. In those cases, however, where social media constituted the direct link to the on-going incidents, traditional media roles shifted and social media were in fact attributed with more factual credibility than traditional media. The trustworthiness of a source was thus assessed as dependent on the content and the situation.

The roles that social media fulfilled during the Norway attacks can be subdivided in two kinds: the first-response kind of functions that mainly constitute the organizational and technical dimension of resilient self-organization (3.1–3.4) and the emotional functions that emerged in the longer aftermath of the attacks and can be associated with a sense of grief and coping (3.5–3.8). While describing the various functions that social media assumed in the process of dealing with the attacks, the interviewees also reflected on a range of challenges, which are presented in response to each function (function vs challenge). Since functions and challenges have been grouped and deducted from over 150 different codes, the categories cannot always be clearly distinguished from one another. Despite their presentation as separate categories, they overlap and merge at various points, and some challenges apply to more than one function.

Accessing information for gaining an overview versus viral misinformation and speculation

In other settings I feel like it’s too much information. Not at that day. That day you just dropped everything and said: this is what we do, we just try to find out what happened.(01)

I heard about misinformation. It’s easier to manufacture news. A small rumor gets quickly spread. (01)

The interviewees described their urge for information about the attacks as unusually intense. The first few days were characterized by the exchange of raw information and the effort to create a coherent picture of the situation: ‘Nothing of it made sense. Maybe I wanted to try to make sense, to get more and more information’ (04). Like in a puzzle, different pieces of information were added together in a continuous update. Even though most of the interviewees considered themselves rather passive users, social media made a lot of information available to them. Many interviewees agree that this was important in order to gain an overview of the incident. Some interviewees also stated that at times there was too much information available, which meant that they either grew tired of the amount or considered some information as too personal. A core criticism was the room that social media left for speculation, which quickly went viral; 18 out of 20 interviewees mentioned that it didn’t take much time before first speculations about the attacks being conducted by Muslims were posted: ‘I had a couple of [Facebook] friends writing some Islamic slurs on the newsfeed. And I remember deleting those friends the same day’ (05). These speculations cascaded through the social network. It was not only considered difficult to distinguish trustworthy from deceptive information, but such speculative posts did also become a political act of digital discrimination and harassment, which was experienced by some interviewees first hand.

At the same time interviewees did mention that social media, as opposed to online newspapers, offered the chance to steer the information they would like to see more actively. They could filter and discuss the deceptive potential of information. In some cases, the cascade of deceptive information even led to forms of digital activism: people warned each other about deceptive information, they apologized for spreading wrong information, or simply deleted those Facebook contacts who posted speculations, while the latter, however, may have also led to a suppression of the actual problem.

Using social media as a tool to gain an overview of the unfolding situation can be considered a first-response kind of resilience activity. The active choice to utilize information circulating on social media for analysis and to access select sources is an expression of the self-initiative, actively rationalizing subject, that harnesses social media’s affordances for its own needs. The availability and character of social media, however, not only enable this interactive usage but also allow for different rationalizations of a specific instance. As such, it presupposes the reflexive usage, which cannot always be guaranteed.

Personal status of wellbeing versus sensationalism

(T)here was this facebook event that someone created saying: ‘I’m in Oslo, but I’m ok’. So it was very easy for everyone to just join the event. And then everyone knew that this person was ok. (03)

Social media, especially Facebook’s network, were used to spread updates about one’s own wellbeing. Many interviewees describe how they and their contacts distributed status updates as a precautionary measure to avoid causing unnecessary worries. Since many users’ networks include more distant friends, social media quickly enabled an overview of each other’s wellbeing. Soon, this trend was identified and institutionalized in the form of a Facebook event, ‘Oslo er i god behold’,⁵ which over 64,000 Osloers joined to signal that they were physically fine. This Facebook event of claiming that one is ‘still alive and physically ok’ is in the first instance a manifestation of resilience as it contributes to the idea of establishing normality. As a form of self-initiated control, self-care, and care for each other, it also speaks to the idea of self-governing capabilities. The way this care came about was at the same time deeply rooted in the interactive and networked character of the infrastructure.

A similar expression of resilience and mediated self-governance is that some interviewees utilized social media to actively identify who is in danger. They followed the status updates of acquaintances and friends on Utøya Island, where the situation was still evolving, given the time delay between the bomb explosion in the city and the shootings on the island. Such updates would for the majority of users cause relief through almost real-time responses about people’s physical conditions or whereabouts. Some interviewees described that the absence of status updates also created worry or confirmed sad news. In the context of checking each other’s wellbeing, the specific format of the Facebook posting was also used not to impose on other people’s private sphere. Some interviewees deliberately used social networking technologies to grant potential victims the freedom to answer or not, which is yet another notion of self-initiated care that is clearly tied to the specifics of the medium.

Using social networks to identify and potentially act upon dangerous situations can instantiate resilient reaction. However, it also nurtures the attraction to sensational and extreme information, as some interviewees described. Among other things, this resulted in the fact that also the attacker’s Facebook profile and his manifest were frequently visited. Some interviewees criticized this behavior, since it answered the attacker’s intention to get attention, which is why protest was expressed by ‘not clicking’ on particular kinds of information: ‘I never watched the video that he posted. The manifest. I didn’t wanna give it a click’ (02). Other users wanted to form a resistance to the attack by spreading positive posts and through ‘claiming the Norwegian flag back’ from the attacker by adding it to their own profile, both of which are forms of social media use for emergency management that presuppose a rationalizing subject.

Direct link to the event and news source versus the omnipresence of terror

(B)eing on twitter I could read the closest information to the incident. (04)

[… ] every time I went online, on facebook or twitter or visiting an online newspaper it popped up in my head. I couldn’t escape it. My boyfriend and I had to arrange breaks form the internet. (16)

Facebook and Twitter were used as a news source or as an entry point to identify relevant news. Especially for those who traveled outside of Oslo, social media served as a direct link to the event, since Norwegian public television did not broadcast outside of national borders and online newspapers did not have much information available at first. It enabled the users to inform themselves in a more direct and personal way than traditional media would cover. The high amount of postings made it possible for readers to follow the situation promptly, not only because smart phones could ‘report from anywhere’, including the sites of the attacks, but also since those posts would not be edited into a news story first. For some interviewees, social media became a primary communication device during the emergency. They deployed Facebook as primary medium to contact friends and family – mostly because it was more efficient than calling via phone. Even a few victims used social media to call for help because they would put themselves into danger by speaking out loud or by being called. In general, people were instructed not to use phones to avoid blocking the lines for those who would need them – or for the fact that some victims had lost their phones: ‘Because I heard – afterwards – that they had dropped their phones in the water and facebook was the only channel they were able to let people know that they were ok’ (06).

These examples can be understood as resilient forms of emergency communication, which is again enabled through the particulars of social media infrastructure. In the sense of self-governance, the subject performs a very first approach of dealing with the attacks in creating an individual news stream or in finding alternative means of communication – a behavior that is not only expressive of self-care but also of care about each other. While most interviewees agreed that social media played an important role for resilient emergency communication, the high amount of postings also entailed substantial efforts to filter out the relevant and valid information and make sense of it. Even though the verification of information was described as a challenge, social media at times gained more credibility than traditional media, precisely because their ‘reporting’ was considered more authentic.

Some interviewees stated that all of these processes could also have taken place without social media. Others went a step further and mentioned that social media also inhibited coping to a certain extent. The fact that every member of one’s social media network posted about the attacks brought the events from public into personal space that was difficult to escape. As a result, users were unable to avoid the topic even when they followed their habit of browsing social media for everyday purposes. The social network constantly reminded its members of the attacks.

Organization and advice versus in/validity of information

Someone wrote: avoid crowded areas, don’t use cell phones in Oslo, don’t occupy the net, go home, don’t use public transportation, don’t panic – in a matter-of-factly way. (17)

Social media were used to send out concrete advice about how to deal with the situation in the city and on Utøya. Information about the victims’ whereabouts, including details about hospitalization and private contact information, was distributed via social media. While the sharing of private information on semi-public media created considerable challenges vis-à-vis personal data protection on the one hand, it also contributed to the governance of the attack’s aftermath on the other, since it could be translated into concrete advice. The latter was, for example, reflected in the different Facebook groups and Twitter posts that were used to organize the chaos caused by the attacks. Facebook events were created to suggest where people could meet up and talk about the event physically or online. One of the founders of the Norwegian event ‘Standing together against terrorism’ got over 100,000 members in just a few hours. After realizing this potential, he changed the name of the group in order to help organizing the rose march event.⁶ Interviewees have described that such Facebook events brought people together, on social media, but also physically, which is yet another instance of resilience and of governing the aftermath of the terror attacks in a self-initiated manner. As such, social media networks not only enabled the efficient distribution of information but also incited concrete action. The cascade of information way beyond territorial borders, however, also contributed to obscurity about the origin of the posts, which again posed problems for the validation of information. In that situation, users first needed to filter out and negotiate truths or rely on mass-based judgments about validity.

Express and experience emotions versus un-reflected use

In terms of information there wouldn’t be much of a difference. But maybe in terms of expressing feelings. Expressing support, there’s definitely a way to do that. (15)

Young people that were involved got interviewed and started blogging shortly after the attack. These things will be there forever. Online. (03)

Dealing with the attacks was not only a matter of technical and practical self-organization but also an act of handling emotions. A trajectory of emotions that was experienced by the interviewees included shock, confusion, disbelief, worry, and fear at first. This was followed by the urge to access information, which was accompanied by a sense of sensationalism. After this first phase, people entered moments of grief, sympathy, compassion, and sadness, which endured for a longer period. Some of it translated into love, care, unity, solidarity, support, and mutual respect on the one hand, but also hate, anger, and disagreement with the terrorist views on the other. As part of this second phase, interviewees also described how a moment of pride about the Norwegian’s official reactions to the attacks was coupled to a moment of self-inquiry, asking what would have happened if the attacker would not have been a Norwegian. Indicators for returning to normality after the attacks were everyday-style postings and the return of humor on social media.

While social media were not judged instrumental in bringing about these emotions, they were still described as a platform, which allowed its users to affect and to be affected: emotions were described, distributed, consumed, experienced, and conserved in a networked manner. Where emotions could not be expressed in words, pictures and symbols were used as a visual way of communicating, for example, through roses and hearts, Norwegian flag badges, candles, but also pictures of the bombed government quarter or the victims. These became powerful symbols because they cascaded, like all the other expressions of emotions, through the network. To what extent they contributed to emotional resilience cannot be generalized. Some interviewees, however, mentioned that social media were approached to calibrate one’s own emotion toward a community of grief, but also to reassure oneself of one’s own emotions through sharing. It is thus likely that social media enabled and reinforced a form of dealing with the attacks on an emotional level, as well as instances of care and self-care. The high level of shared information about one’s private emotions was, however, to a certain extent regarded as un-reflected. Posts containing personal thoughts, ideas, and opinions cascaded through the social network by being re-posted, which made this information available to an almost unknown amount of other users, online, for an indeterminate length of time.

Therapeutic sharing and digital mourning versus infringements upon privacy

[Name] has his own memory page. I think his cousin made it. It’s a page you can like. Yes, I like it. I haven’t written – that doesn’t feel right. I didn’t know him. But it’s a very active page in general. (16)

People might have been offended that their personal information was shared and distributed so freely as it was then. As well as their whereabouts, etc., names, pictures being distributed by people they do not know. (11)

Both victims and their friends used social media among other things to talk about and share experiences, for example, by posting pictures of Utøya from before 2011 to symbolize that good memories of Utøya would not be destroyed by the attack. Some victims also used the virtual proximity, but physical distance of social media to share their experiences, but avoided direct physical reactions of pity toward them. Others used social media as a platform to signal whether they would want attention or not. While many interviewees would not post much about their personal feelings, some still appreciated the opportunity to send condolences virtually. It was a way of ‘letting the victims know’ and also of saying goodbye to the deceased, but in a manner that does not require face-to-face contact or a phone call with the affected.

Other mediated instances of grief were online minutes of silence, pictures of candles, personal letters and entries for victims, so-called human chains of virtually holding hands, and memory pages that were established for the deceased victims. To some, these served an important instance of not forgetting, since memories and stories about victims were shared here. This networked aspect of sharing and caring about each other was described as impressive, and even those who would not post anything personal said that it helped to see how people remembered victims. The network instantiated new, mediated forms of mourning that were characterized by a non-physical contact with victims on the one hand, but engendered on the other hand a collective, cascading form of care for each other that clearly exceeded the notion of self-care that is often foregrounded in resilience studies. How this behavior was experienced by victims and how it changes the sociology of resilience still needs to be assessed and discussed.

While many positive aspects about this form of grieving were mentioned, some interviewees considered it problematic that a deceased person was somehow kept alive virtually and in a semi-public space where questions of post-mortem privacy would also play an important role. In that respect, the process of balancing personal, private, and public information was one of the main challenges. Many interviewees made a distinction between personal and private information. Postings were personal if they included information about someone being physically affected by the events, if feelings or personal thoughts were shared. Privacy, however, was defined as something factual: names, contact details, and photos in which you could identify a victim. Others thought that private information was that the kind of personal information which was simply too unpleasant to know. Speculating whether Muslims would be responsible for the attack, for example, was also considered a thought you may have in private, but should not share. Most interviewees, however, mentioned that expressions can be personal without being private. In the context of the attacks, for example, people seemed to have been willing to share personal thoughts publicly for different reasons, but mostly because ‘we were all in it together’ (01). Thus, showing otherwise private emotions publicly was considered as something positive, as a credible statement. One interviewee, however, referred to a posting of a person on Utøya who updated his followers about the place they were hiding. This information, even if it was meant to calm down worried followers, could also have been harvested by other parties, not least the attacker himself.

In sum, the network seemed to have inspired a form of resilience through the sharing of personal information. This, however, also involved procedures of negotiating what is considered public and what private knowledge. This again presupposes a subject that rationalizes and reviews these different options carefully.

Shaping versus making opinion

[… ] and it was a general attempt in trying to process everything that was going on. I mean, people also talked about it face-to-face. I know they did, but I guess on facebook you could put thoughts out there and you could get different reactions from different people potentially. (10)

Vis-à-vis the traditional media, social media offered a forum where people accessed different personal views, where opinions were shaped and moral standpoints were calibrated: What is extreme? What is a just reaction? What are shared Norwegian values? While defining one’s own position was an important part of creating resilience by processing and dealing with the events, some have described the information exchange on social media rather as a process of making opinion – as opposed to really discussing perspectives. This was appointed to the limited format of the postings. Other interviewees mentioned that they were not comfortable with posting opinions themselves, which is why they refrained from taking part in these processes as an active user. Some interviewees, however, agree that the debate, especially without Twitter, would have been different. Twitter played a special role for dealing with the event with respect to political questions and different perspectives.

This goes to show that the networked character of social media had a concrete impact on how opinions, views, and certain rationales came about. Even though it was mentioned that the format left little space for discussion itself, it still allowed for accessing different perspectives and comments. Disentangling, organizing, and assessing these different views from each other was an important instance of the rationalizing subject, who seeks to (re-)construct a sense of normality by getting hold of different views. It presupposes, though, a reflected media use.

Virtual unity versus unanswered ambiguities

So the parade was the physical coming-together and then the pictures and the status-updates of support [… ] that’s the virtual coming-together, [… ], which is probably just as important, if not more. (17)

By collecting and producing expressions of how many people felt, social media created a virtual sense of unity that was often compared to the solidarity expressed during the rose marches. The interviewees felt that they were part of something bigger. While the networked aspect of social media created a sense of a digital coming together, which – according to some interviewees – may have had an impact on the way that solidarity, support, care, pride, and empathy were expressed, other interviewees mentioned that social media could also have inspired a form of slacktivism (17): the sheer mass of mourning users would force each other into creating unity online, which didn’t even take much energy to express.

The character of social media furthermore enabled the silencing of voices and the expression of hate and anger, which may not have been countered or discussed properly, especially in the context of the attacker’s extreme views on Norwegian culture, politics, and society. This left some interviewees with a feeling of hypocrisy: Norway’s way of dealing with the attacks was not only about care and unity. It also included aspects that were too complex or too unpopular to be discussed online. Thus, in a positive sense social media did enable a form of dealing with the attacks that was not just a matter of the individual self but a collective, social self. At the same time social media furthered the instantiation of not only one unified collective but a collective that is diverse and could easily be subjected to diverse political currents.

Conclusion: resilience 2.0 and the (self-)caring subject

(P)eople tried to make social media (help) to go back to their lives by organizing: oh this has happened, but we’re going to bring some flowers, bring some hearts and then we’re going to continue with our live. And restoring that sense of normality. (11)

The networked character of social media implicates many affordances that social media users translated into concrete resilience functions and practices during the 2011 Norway attacks. Departing from the understanding that resilience is a technique and mentality of self-governance during emergencies, this article has shown how the networked character of the medium influenced the way in which practices of self-governance came about. As such, it built on Grusin’s notion of mediality and illustrated how the everyday technology of social media contributed to the production and circulation of information during emergencies. Together, social media infrastructures and its users created new forms of self-initiated and mediated resilience governance, each of which entailed its own set of challenges. Even though most of these practices emerged spontaneously, this trend has already been integrated into programs to enhance social media use for emergency management, which will demand a separate critical investigation. The article’s case study, however, invites conclusions about more overarching questions that concern both, the spontaneous and the politicized forms of social media use for crisis management, namely, ‘How do resilience practices and the resilient subject itself change under the influence of 2.0 technologies?’. Keeping this question in mind, the following paragraphs offer preliminary conclusions about the particular aspects concerning space, time and vision.

Space – the network mediated the experience of space, since both, the event itself and also physically distant friends and family members were virtually as close as on the screen in the living room: ‘It somehow brings people closer in time and space, because you can have everyone gathered in facebook’ (10).This created a perception of proximity to other users in general, but to the scene of the attacks in specific. This change in spatial perception not only contributed to a collective mediated experience of the incident but also influenced how social media users became part of the various instances of dealing with the attacks. It was through the connectivity between users across space that social media users were drawn into the event – irrespective of their physical whereabouts. As a result, most social media users who became interested in the incident would also contribute to the production and circulation of information about it, whether that happened through the recirculation of advice or the experience of mediated unity.

Time – the networked character of 2.0 technologies also mediated the experience of the emergent present by effectively influencing information flows. Information moved faster through social networks and seemed more instant than information distributed by other media. This influenced both the experience of urgency and emergency, but also the process of dealing with worries about the physical wellbeing of one’s closest contacts. While the time-efficient information exchange may have accelerated response, it also entailed negative consequences for resilience, such as the fast travel of deceptive information and the difficulty to organize the overwhelming amount of information, views, and expressions.

Vision – social networking sites also engendered new ways of seeing, watching, and viewing the emergency, since all of the circulated information could be collected on one platform. This contributed to the identification of dangerous areas and of people in danger, which could be translated into concrete emergency response. Beyond that, social media also enabled the ‘watching’ of the attacks in the sense of sensationalism on the one hand, and as a practice of censoring difficult themes on the other. As one interviewee mentioned, ‘you could have the whole nation against you if you said something wrong that day’ (15). At the same time social media did enable a form of ‘watching out’ for each other in the positive sense of sharing and caring. As such, it engendered mediated forms of sharing, of community and unity. Even though this unity was a mediated experience and did not happen face-to-face, people felt that they were part of ‘something bigger’ that spread all over the country, which may have contributed to societal resilience on the one hand, or may have taken momentum away from more direct forms of social contact on the other.

On an overarching level, this article has illustrated how subjects form technologies and technologies form subjects: the networked character of social media had a direct effect on how (self-)caring subjects came into existence, at the same time as these subjects translated the various affordances of the network into concrete resilience practices. From this interaction between subjects and technologies, new ways of governing emergencies arose, including technical and emotional forms of self-organization, with potential for both positive or negative effects. Within the world of 2.0 technologies, the resilient subject is situated in a network and thus also in a potentially unlimited collective. It is a subject whose experiences of urgency are not only mediated but shared and individuated at the same time, and whose actions are enabled and constrained by the networked infrastructure. As such, resilience is no longer only about the ‘self’ in self-organization, but the subject’s governance of emergencies necessarily needs to incorporate the idea of collectivity. The subject’s resilient (re-)actions are mediated, which may not only affect itself and its reality of the emergency experience, but they also affect a potentially unknown collectivity of users. This may produce positive as well as negative effects for its own and collective resilience – a fact that should inform the subject’s processes of rationalization and mediated interactions.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received funding from the Norwegian Research Council and was written in the context of the project ‘Negotiating Values: Collective Identities and Resilience after 22/7’, grant number 220797/F10.

Notes

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