Following the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009, a convenience sample of data from a variety of social network services (SNS) was assembled to investigate how people were using social media to understand and respond to the events. Two broad trends have so far emerged: social media were used to construct vernacular, as opposed to ‘expert’, knowledges of the events; and SNS were sites of performance of self as caring, empathetic and ethical. Any emergency media communication strategy seeking to mobilise SNS would do well to understand the place of SNS in popular constructions of catastrophic events.
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