Hypothesizing the Aptness of Social Media and the Information Richness Requirements of Disaster Management

In this article, the author first analyzes the social presence theory, media richness theory and taskmedia fit to investigate the suitability of various types of Social Media in disaster management. Then, on the basis of this analysis, use of social media is proposed to facilitate the communication tasks involved in the interaction between disaster management agencies and communities during disaster management. Next the author adapt a conceptual framework that integrates three types of communication (involving disaster management agencies and communities). The framework is further used as a springboard to develop a number of hypotheses to predict the aptness of rich and lean types of Social Media against the media richness requirements of disaster management tasks.