Blogging the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Milwaukee.
Daisy Pignetti is the next speaker at AoIR 2009, and focusses on the post-Hurricane Katrina blogosphere. She calls this Disaster 2.0, with events such as the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York as Disaster 1.0 (a time when many users had substantial difficulty accessing the Internet, and had to employ smart, lateral strategies in order to work out what was going on). In the aftermath, citizens of the US came together online to share their stories and perceptions of the event, and this led to substantial change.

During Katrina, television coverage was substantially hindered by the catastrophe itself - journalists couldn't get to the scene of the event itself, due to the flooding, and at times said that they 'just didn't know' what was happening; the Net, by contrast, performed much better in covering the event and helping with emergency relief. For the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the paper's blog actually became the paper as the printed paper couldn't be delivered, of course; the site Katrina.com became an information centre for disaster relief, and many other such sites emerged as well. One site that was developed mapped the flooding depth onto Google Maps, in fact.

This provided much better transparency by combining pieces of information provided by people on the ground - there was a collaboratively constructed but nonetheless raw picture of the event, rather than a polished, journalistic narrative of the disaster, and to some extent this was quite deliberately opposed to the mainstream media's perfunctory coverage. These reports were not necessarily factual or impartial, but highly subjective and emotional, but nonetheless authentic.

New Orleans bloggers also organised a real-life meeting one year on from the disaster, and there as well as online Daisy interviewed these bloggers to gather their stories. This is also an effort to right/write the wrong in its own right. What emerges is that many of these people are still spurred on by Katrina and its aftermath to engage in coverage of New Orleans from a more or less citizen-journalistic perspective; they feel an obligation to their city, to rebuild their community, to maintain the rage against government neglect. This documents an awareness of a basic need to give and receive information.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Hurricane, Katrina, New Orleans, blogs, citizen journalism, disaster, history, recovery
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, Hurricane, Katrina, New Orleans, blogs, citizen journalism, disaster, history, recovery