How Facebook Framed Messages to Mobilize Residents during Chennai Floods in 2015

Abstract

With the technological innovations, communication has become tremendously fast making the world small. Social media is one such innovation which began ruling the online culture of interaction. Its instantaneous popularity and timeliness is the best way to communicate around the globe. The top social networkingsite, Facebook, has52 lakhs smartphone users in Chennai, which is the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This trend of accessing Facebook via smartphones makes it handy during crisis when there are power disruptions. Unexpected floods occurred in Chennai in November-December 2015 and Chennai was officially declared a disaster city on December 2. The usually busy Chennai city became standstill with the loss of humans and infrastructure. Communication became a major problem with the mobile networks and landlines going for a toss. The then isolated city had all its sources of communication cut, except access to Facebook and mobile. Facebook was an important tool in disseminating information on Chennai floods in 2015. So, it is important to understand how Facebook framed messages during Chennai floods, which helps to understand its role of reinforcing and public perception of it. Through discourse analysis of the most popular posts of #Chennai Micro, an initiative by RJ Balaji and actor Siddharth in Facebook during the time period December 2 to 6, 2015 are studied. This study examines how crisis was framed by media organizations, non-profit organizations, celebrities, RJ Balaji&Siddharth, and individuals to contribute in bringing Chennai back to normal.