Compassion at a distance: How ordinary people are enabling their compassion to self‐organize disaster relief efforts remotely and collaboratively

Abstract

AbstractThe continuity in technologically mediated environments relentlessly reconfigures the temporal nature of disaster impacts and facilitates emergent behavior of ordinary people coming into being as a group for humanitarian efforts. This study looks at forms of remote collaborative action, especially ones among ordinary people with rudimentary knowledge and skills who utilize appropriate technologies and other resources that are available to them even though they do not have any prior experiences of this kind or pre‐disaster histories of collaboration among themselves. There is a need for better understanding of how ordinary people are able to self‐organize relief work and how technologies leverage their compassion and distance for such action. I am exploring these issues in the context of a group of Japanese women living in Finland as they responded to the 2011 Japanese disaster. Despite their distance from the disaster site, the seven Japanese women living in Finland orchestrated people, information, and technologies through interactions in digital and physical social spaces learning by doing how to deliver Finnish baby formula directly to the disaster‐affected mothers and families in Japan.