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The Campus is Under Seige and I go to Facebook???Created by Anna Gould (EDUCAUSE) on August 25, 2008
On Friday, the Chronicle featured an article (Emergency Alerts via Facebook and MySpace are New Ways to Reach Students, 8/22/08) on how some campuses are looking for ways to use Facebook (FB) and MySpace as tools for transmitting emergency information. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. It would seem that almost every student nowadays is plugged into FB or MySpace, and young twenty-somethings are increasingly finding news about people, friends, and family with the social networking sites (myself being no exception). However, I question the idea that students will automatically log into their FB accounts if a dire emergency is underway. If buildings were collapsing around me, my last thought would be to log onto Facebook. I tend to think these types of sites are probably better for AFTER the emergency. That said, there is something to be said about using these sites for ongoing emergency communication. For example, for anyone stuck in lower Manhattan on 9/11 when the telephone lines were overburdened, a site like Facebook could have been useful as they waited for information for hours. Then again, CNN.com might have accomplished the same thing as well. If anything, FB is a tool designed more for collecting reactions and sharing anecdotes, than promoting pro-active, timely (emphasis on timely) emergency advice. I've got a cell phone for that.
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I am not advocating one way or the other, but I think their is a valid argument to be made for using these site along with IM, SMS, web, e-mail, phone, broadcast TV, PA systems, sirens.
The reason one might choose to publish an alert to a social networking site is that so many students login regularly that you will have always be some proportion of the population on the site who receive the alert when it hits and spread the information to people close to them. The article advocated a multifaceted messaging approach, and don't think that any of the schools trying it would advocate for only using social networking sites, or say "for more information visit facebook". I suspect the reverse, that facebook notices alert the students and suggest other places for official information.
I am going to make an N of 1 observation (that is I have no evidence to generalize this). The students who work in my lab check their FB accounts routinely through their shifts. If something were going on on campus, My suspicion is that they would get the notification via FB before almost anything else, even SMS, as they routinely ignore texts coming to their phone during work. They would quickly share that with the rest of the lab and turn to other sources for more information.
While I think this bears testing, i suspect that the more channels we use the better, especially since the cost of doing this is relatively small. It would be an interesting experiment to test penetration of messages through different channels to see how many are needed to achieve saturation of the population with the message.