Social media for disaster management: the Sri Lankan context

Abstract

Impacts of disasters were expeditious in the last decade due to the insufficiency of existing traditional Disaster Management (DM) practices. Though the social media discovered as a vital tool to enhance DM all over the world, dearth of literature found for the context of Sri Lanka. Therefore, this research focuses on identifying the use of social media for the DM in the context of Sri Lanka and to increase the support given to the possible victims, related to DM through the adoption of social media. A comprehensive literature review has been carried out to investigate the concept of social media and its relationship with DM. Case study research strategy has been used for the data collection on identifying the benefits and limitations on usage of social media for DM in the Sri Lankan context. Collected data analysed using content analysis. Findings of the study revealed, early warning as the most common benefit of using social media for DM in the Sri Lankan context. It was also identified from this study that, there are limitations related to quality of information, public commitment towards social media and financial barriers, which hinder the application of social media in Sri Lanka.