Social Networks and Superstorms
In October 2013, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in my small hometown in New Jersey. Hundreds of residents, including my family, were displaced after a tidal surge sent floodwaters down the south end of our street overnight. We had experienced superstorms and hurricanes in previous years but ignored flood warnings and the call for sandbags because previous storms had done little to no damage. As the sun came up and rescue boats came down our streets, we decided to leave with our neighbors, concerned that our main support system throughout the storm was also in need of help.
In this article, the author, Daniel Aldrich, aims to study how social interactions and the information that is spread through them might influence evacuation patterns in the face of natural disasters. Evacuations almost always save lives; however, some people often refuse to evacuate in times of despair. Through this study, Aldrich discovers that social networks, particularly with connections to those outside of your clusters, influence decisions in these crucial moments.
As previously described in class, social networks are defined as a graph structure in which people and groups of people are represented as nodes connected through social interactions, represented by edges. These social ties or interactions can be either strong or weak, according to Granovetter’s observations. Here, Aldrich describes these ties as: (1) “Bonding ties, connections to close family and friends”, (2) “Bridging ties, which connect them through a shared interest, workplace”, and (3) “Linking ties, which connect them to people in positions of power”. Aldrich concludes that individuals were more likely to evacuate if they had more connections aside from their bonding ties. From class, I learned that this is potentially because these people would have larger social networks and valuable information and support is more likely to come from acquaintances.
Though we might assume that bonding ties are the most important, a closer examination reveals that they are not. My family felt supported and were willing to weather the storm because of our immediate network, which mainly consisted of our neighbors—thus, we did not feel the need to evacuate. Perhaps if we had stronger bridging and linking ties, we might have been more comfortable evacuating from home and received more accurate information from authority figures. The misconception of seeing our bonding ties not evacuate and underestimating the power of this storm put us face-to-face with danger. This article showed me how a social network can have larger implications beyond social media, and how it migh have the power to save lives.
Link: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-social-networks-disasters.html