“Flooded Timelines: The Communicative Roles & Functions of Twitter in the 2013 Calgary Flood”

Abstract

This study employs directed content analysis to examine the value and communicative uses of Twitter during the 2013 Calgary Flood from multiple perspectives. Using the Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) and Houston et al.’s (2014) UGT-based, framework for social media as a theoretical lens, this study finds that Twitter was a very useful tool with several affordances. It was actively used by individual citizens and several types of organizational users, whose psychological dispositions influenced how they interacted with the platform. Given that most previous disaster social media studies are written from the perspective of disaster management organizations utilizing crisis communication, this research contributes a greater understanding of both organizations’ and individuals’ communicative use of disaster social media.