Texting during Katrina

Rough outline of research questions:

One of the hallmarks of disasters is the breakdown of communication and the lack of information both for affected publics and those whose friends and loved ones may be affected. Disasters are often marked by information “underload” when infrastructures are damaged and common communication technologies, such as phones, fail. At such times, lack of information can increase levels of stress both for disaster victims and those related to them. In disasters people search for ways to find information and will creatively appropriate existing and new technologies for the purpose. While the majority of discussion in this paper will have to do with use of text-messaging, I want to make the introduction and research themes more general because I believe that this adoption process is similar for different kinds of technologies, and texting is simply a good example here.

Themes:

1. During disasters or emergencies, people will go to great lengths to acquire information about the disaster state, their relatives and friends, etc. They will use whatever is available for this purpose. This means they will both creatively utilize familiar technologies and quickly adopt new ones for the purpose. One of the hallmarks of this process is the creativity and speed of adoption.
2. experience with new uses of familiar technologies or acquaintance with new technologies will be the impetus for readjusting behaviors to integrate this experience. However, while some may integrate this experience as an emergency-only procedure, others will further integrate the technology use practice into the experience of daily life post-disaster.
3. Gaining ability to communicate and obtain information may be a way to reduce stress during disaster response and recovery processes as well as a way to cope with the experience through recounting. Ability to communicate necessary information to others may also serve as a way to take control of the situation and to feel helpful – a method of coping with the trauma of the disaster

So questions:

1. How, when, where did people figure out communication strategies by creatively adapting familiar technologies and adopting new ones?
2. What was communicated most often and what were the perceived outcomes?
3. Did ability to communicate provide relief from stress or facilitate psychological healing?
4. What happened when newly adopted technology did not work?

Literature to consider:

1. Community/organizational innovation – Kendra & Watchendorf
2. Organizational flexibility/transactional memory/swift trust – Jarvenpaa et al., Bechky
3. Technology adoption
   1. Haddon – domesticating mobiles
   2. Kiesler – troubles with the internet (learning technology use from members of the family, etc).
   3. Mark et al. – remote communication and technology diffusion
   4. Riviere & Licoppe – from voice to text
   5. Rogers – importance & personal influence in technology adoption
   6. Smoreda & Licoppe – residential technology adoption
   7. Young – diffusion of innovation in social networks
   8. McPherson – homophily
   9. Hiller – new ties, old ties, diaspora
   10. Orlikowski – using technology, constituting structures
4. Disaster tech use
   1. Palen & Liu – citizen communication
   2. Procopio – do you know what it means to miss new orleans
   3. Thelwall -RUOK? blogging during crisis
   4. Communication when it’s needed most – Annenberg report
5. Psychological functioning
   1. Silver – temporal shifts
   2. Janoff-Bullman – shattered assumptions
   3. Pennebaker – written expression and communication as coping with trauma

Notes on NOLA music scene

Some notes based on my reading of H. Kruse’s “Site and Sound”.

1. NOLA music scene is circumscribed by the geographic, social and cultural locality. Despite intense tourism, the music scene remains profoundly local by maintaining practices and performance spaces outside of the tourist circuit and dependnant on the locals and each other to survive. There seems to be a practice of making a living and one of making music – often these are separate activities. Making music is the local process that feeds off the cultural history of the city as well as the wealth of talent in close quarters. It may be that it is the lack of this kind of enmeshed involvement in music making and exploration that musicians outside of NOLA experience and this is what damages their psychological well-being/abilty or desire to play music/get gigs.

2. The local musical involvement is about social space of music making. It is profoundly connected to the business of tourist entertainment that enables it to continue to exist by providing the kinds of jobs that allow musicians to make money simply from music. People outside the geographical space of NOLA are also outside the social space. When they come visit, the financial justification of spending time and effort to participate in the local music space – the unpaid gigs of musical exploration and local color – is absent and maybe not sustainable even if personal/social motivations are present.

3. Only very well-known individual musicians who have already developed individual acts (i.e. Henry Butler) may survive outside NOLA and continue producing the NOLA sound, however, how marketable that sound may be outside of NOLA is questionable (see “Up from the cradle of Jazz” notes).

4. The economic dynamic of working musicians is complex as they have to negotiate the less “artistic” but necessary money-making opportunities and still support the less commercial but “authentic” musical endeavors. The latter is often supported by the locals and by other musicians in small non-touristy bars (i.e. dragons’ den) as a cultural and social practice.

5. Regardless of the type of performance, NOLA performances are highly interactive with audiences. The become more so when these performances are more local, with musicians in the audience getting up on stage to jam for a song and with audience singing and dancing along and then interacting with musician after performances.

6. Gaining access to performance spaces requires some stature in the community – so involvement in the community and gaining social contacts within is tied to economic and social success. In other words, engaging in the social process of jamming together at small non-commercial gatherings invites others to hear and evaluate each other’s abilities. This in turn can open the possibility of jamming or sitting in on a song during a paid gig, which, in turn, opens up possibilities of actually getting paid gigs. It’s a process of building reputations and refreshing memories of others who may have gigs to “give away” – thus being outside the geographical locality means being oustide the social space and can result in a virtual “removal” from the NOLA music scene.

2007 food people notes

If the music scene in nola is doing relatively well after Katrina, the food scene seems far less certain of its own survival. “Restaurants in the quarter are struggling” as several of our respondents mentioned. These are restaurants that had been in the same place for more than a hundred years sometimes and they are anticipating the coming summer with about as much dread as last time. Not all of the stories are heartbreak of course – even if work is hard and survival is hard, many of our respondents have settled into the routine of this survival, making do and keeping things together under less than perfect conditions. Yet the prospect of the next summer seemed almost as daunting as last year – a sense of dread that was almost entirely absent in the music interviews.

2007 musician interview notes

This year’s trip was far easier than last year, at least emotionally. Where last year many of the interviews were somber and even heavy with sad emotion and pain, this year things were more hopeful, more settled, less emotional. It seemed people’s lives had gotten back to some level of familiar even if many things still represented problems and many people were tired of fighting. Many had said that things were pretty much back to normal.

For most, their houses had no damage or little damage and those that were in NOLA last year pretty much had their lives back to normal. It was same people, same gigs, same audience… almost. A lot more work because there were fewer musicians in town, so some reconfiguration of usual gigs and familiar bands had to happen. Musicians that used to work a lot pre-Katrina were back to working a lot and often said they could work more if they had wanted to. Many mentioned, however, that some of the more creative outlets have been reduced (clubs were less willing to take a risk with experimental music) and the pay in the same clubs has gotten less. Many music outlets that had opened right after Katrina had been closed down as well.

There was a sense of absence among professional musicians who derived the majority of their income from music – absence of people they used to play with and the inevitable changes that brought to their creative life. Though they often mentioned musicians that have not returned, their contact continued to be primarily through visits and the physical experience of playing together. Maybe because music-playing requires physical proximity and so much of this culture is acoustic, the bands that ended up geographically distributed are dying off unless their members commit to spending the majority of their time on the road. Maybe the fact that the music is so primarily acoustic also adds to the general caution with which digital technologies are approached and evaluated. Yes iTunes is very useful, but digital music itself is of a different quality. This coming from people who regard even CD’s with some measure of disdain. For many it’s all about MAKING music. CD’s and digital recordings are a business card, an entry to produce music and get paid for it.

It’s not like there is a lack of technology in this community. On the contrary, musicians tend to be fairly “wired” people. Even those that shun cellular phones as a form of contact admit to “trolling” the internet and maintain a lot of interest in the digital world. Musicians themselves are wired and connected, conducting a large proportion of their coordination through cell phones and maybe even text messaging, email, personal websites, myspace and other music-related digital offerings. Yet the personal contact, the creative interactions and the “kibbutzing” between sets are all relegated to face-to-face. New Orleans is a small town and it certainly allows people to simply run into each other when they want to. Certainly the distributed nature of some groups has forced a large amount of organization and planning but even this planning seemingly stays just a little bit loose. How is this looseness connected to the “jamming” improvisational culture of this music scene that apparently is uncommon in other places (is it really? or maybe in other places the improvisation is relegated to some genres and not others)?

There is a sense of being or becoming an outsider after having earned a place within the New Orleans music community from musicians that are living elsewhere but still playing when they come back to NOLA. We’d heard that entry into the exclusive club of successful-enough musicians in NOLA is not simple, with strong hierarchies of being born in NOLA or having been educated at the New Orleans University trumping those that are uninitiated. Some had mentioned that these hierarchies had shifted and loosened up with so many people gone and so many others having moved in to fill the the openings. This feeling of suddenly becoming an outsider seemed to be unsettling to those that have not returned to New Orleans, like a loss of something precious and difficult to earn.

Yes in general musicians and the nola music scene are doing well. Venues are open and music is being played and celebrated. There are some altercations with the governing bodies over rebuilding and music permits, there are some concerns over loss of convention business and lower pay from the clubs, but the music is alive, kicking and moving. The scene also seems to be a little but more open to the outside world with a bit more touring in varying places and acknowledgments that the sudden formation of a nola diaspora around the country has also formed new markets for nola musicians – there is now a strong audience base for Kermit Ruffins in Houston and Atlanta for example. Lesser known musicians have also been using digital self-promotion as a way to meet other bands, expand their musical range and reach as well as organize tours in new places. Yet Kermit doesn’t want to travel very much and many who have finally manged to return to NOLA have a hard time leaving. There has been so much movement and travel that there was a small sense of fatigue from it.

The “scene” in NOLA is alive and is considered unique even by those that are not part of that scene anymore by virtue of living elsewhere. The question is, how is the scene going to morph, which directions will it follow and how it will transform over time with new blood coming in and some old blood flowing out or never returning, with a listener diaspora building outside the city in different parts of the country. What shape will things take on over time? These are SO not HCI questions! Ok… how about… how will changes in face-to-face time for people who are traveling, moving about and living elsewhere affect the nature of their participation in this scene. IS remote participation possible and if so, how well and how much?

Staying, moving or coming back?

This is a set of thoughts for what we are trying to learn with the survey and how to operationalize those:

The set of questions can be divided into essentially four major blocks:

1. Personal attributes (measured via self-report for three time periods, pre-Katrina, year after and now)
   1. Social ties in NOLA (Friends and family)
   2. Social ties where they are living now (or outside of NOLA if they are living in NOLA) again, friends and family
   3. Economic prospects in NOLA – professional vs. other (for musicians we are looking to see whether music or other ways of supporting themselves are available in the event music is not enough).
   4. Economic prospects where they live now or outside of NOLA
2. Group level variables – these are much harder to operationalize and we need to think carefully think about how to ask these
   1. Special culture – NOLA – these questions relate to things like cultural capital, importance of music and NOLA style, etc.
   2. Culture outside of NOLA or where they live now (how it compares and whether it is important)
   3. Prior commitment to NOLA
   4. How much does being FROM NOLA comprise respondent’s identity
   5. Sense of purpose in rebuilding NOLA
3. Technology use variables – HCI nod
   1. Cell phones – whether they have them, how many, how much they use them, do they text?
   2. Internet – how much do they use the internet? These should involve a set of frequency questions, still need some work
   3. Internet – communication with family, friends, coworkers, fans, people met online
   4. Internet – having a MySpace page, webpage, distribution email list
   5. Internet – blogging, posting information
4. Outcome variables
   1. If money was no object will you leave/return to NOLA (this is a question about fundamental desire to be somewhere)
   2. When did you come back to NOLA (are planning to come back to NOLA)
   3. When are you planning to leave NOLA/how long are you planning to stay

Residential satisfaction model

We are thinking of using the “residential satisfaction” model as a basis for the development of our survey. It’s a nice user-friendly theory with one little snag – we can’t use it wholesale. The original residential satisfaction model is an attempt to summarize the antecedents to the decision to move. In our case we are interested in two things:

1. Decision to come back to NOLA after being forced to leave

2. Actually coming back to NOLA and then deciding to leave again, this time voluntarily.

This essentially means that we have to turn the residential satisfaction model on it’s head in order for it to be useful. So… why would people want to come back? What are the factors that might influence this decision?

1. First, of course, there is how satisfied they were with their life in NOLA prior to Katrina. This is that measure of commitment to a place. There are many things that can be part of this satisfaction of course – people (friends and/or family), culture, economic state, residential comfort, feelings of belonging to a place and a community, etc. We can’t measure all of these but we have to figure out at least some measure of what NOLA meant to our respondents pre-Katrina. In a way, how much of their identity the act of living in NOLA and being from NOLA comprised. This is could be a powerful cause for actions towards coming back.
2. Second and also extremely important is satisfaction with the place where they ended up. Here it’s a combination of factors – did they receive aid, did they have a choice of location to evacuate to, as well as does the place “fit” them – i.e. is it “environmentally congruent”.
   1. So… do they have relatives in this location?
   2. Do they have friends in this location?
   3. Is life in this location economically feasible and sound? Does this mean they can do something similar to their activities in NOLA? Something they like?
   4. Do they like their residence, is it comfortable?
   5. Does the culture “jive”? Does it feel accepting to them?
   6. Does “being FROM this place” sound ok?
3. Economic determinants – these are purely structural factors of the respondents’ SES and their current economic situation that would affect their ability to return
   1. Housing availability in NOLA – regardless of whether they like their current location, having a place to go back to in NOLA would probably make a huge difference.
      1. So did they rent vs. own before Katrina?
      2. Was their living situation destroyed or heavily damaged during the hurricane or did it remain liveable?
      3. If they rented (or owned) really, did leaving in the same place become too expensive and unaffordable? Rent went up, insurance costs went up, etc.
   2. Financial prospects
      1. Would coming back to NOLA mean loosing a current stream of income?
      2. Is there work in NOLA if/when they come back?
      3. Is there work in their current location that is sustainable and has future prospects?

All of the above are a combination of what was (pre-Katrina), what is (current situation), and what could be (evaluations of the future). The latter, evaluations of the future are a combination of predictions of likelihood of changes in the environment (i.e. NOLA getting hit by hurricane again) and likelihood of personal success (economic and emotional).

Bach & Smith also conclude that expectation to leave only matters if people are dissatisfied with their life in the current location – under these conditions both satisfaction and the interaction with the decision to leave are significant predictors.

In what we are considering there is a big difference. People could be perfectly satisfied with their current location but wanting to leave anyway because of commitment to NOLA precisely because the action of leaving NOLA was not voluntary. This is where Landale & Guest come in. This paper pretty explicitly states that satisfaction is all good and well but people still move regardless. Still… Landale and Guest do not consider the concept of “commitment” which, I suspect is key in this situation.

Thinking about NOLA as part of identity, I think of Urry’s discussion of “dwelling” and his definition of “diaspora.” Urry defines diaspora as “the notion that ‘the old country’ where one is no longer living, exerts some claim upon one’s loyalties, emotions and identity. Such an old country can be defined in terms of language, religion, customs or folklore.” So as NOLA “refugees” become a “diaspora” by virtue of not coming back, staying in the new place, does their commitment to NOLA transform into this idea of “diaspora”?

Commitment to NOLA & identity theory

Bach & Smith (1977) find that vairous levels of commitment may have something to do with whether people actually move or not. “Inidividuals carry with them a number of commitments to the community. The degree of commitment distinguishes several qualitatively different groups. At the “extremes”, and individual can be either so committed that it is vritually impossible to leave or pracitcally uncommitted and “free”.” (p. 163) These levels of commitment have an effect on whether people reach or not reach the “planning phase”.

I want to think about the word “commitment” here. Can this be considered in light of Stryker’s identity theory where “commitment” is a concept that describes position of specific identities in the hierarchy of self. This is also the one place where psychological (vs. sociological) identity theory actually connects to social structure and social relationships. So… if NOLA is part of identity and people for whom it is a large part of identity (i.e. they are committed to NOLA as part of their identity, something that is reinforced by their social relationships) , then they would be more likely to return. The question is, how would we measure this “commitment” to NOLA pre-Katrina vs. now because one could argue that it could change in view of what has happened since Katrina.

How does commitment  change? Under what circumstances? What external and internal factors would be at play here?

Community apart

One of the things I was trying to communicate in the abstract sent to the Katrina conference was the idea that this change from a face-to-face community to one that is dispersed is a really important, real problem where technology is seriously falling short. Here we saw a culture that was insular and very very much place-attached. It was also extremely face-to-face with all the gray areas of flexible social normative actions built into the way people interacted and did business. Oh there are many articles on diaspora and the way people try to preserve their culture from when they left or keep in touch to feel a part of a culture. Yet I wonder whether for many of these types of activities its actually more of preserving a museum of culture – a slice of culture from what it was when they left. I know that Brighton Beach, for example, is FSU of 20 years ago and that many russian immigrants get stuck in the culture that they left not one that exists today.

Culture isn’t static it constantly moves and evolves and changes, adjusting to contingencies, progress, inventions, new technologies, new generations. It shifts and morphs and it never stands still. I have a feeling that technology is very good at allowing people in the diaspora to preserve a sort of impression, almost a photograph of a culture, but not to continue their participation in its evolution, not to continue being a part of that evolution unless they make continuous trips home – this is why diaspora often evolves its own culture, different, a little stunted and a lot influenced.

Back to NOLA. Here you have a culture where people hang out, drop by places for meetings, chance or “chance” encounters, run into each other on the street. Few things are actually planned or obviously coordinated (especially in the case of musicians meeting up and picking up playing at others’ gigs or looking for new playing partners). Think of H from ML saying that he figures out whom to invite to play at the club from listening to other musicians that are at his club for some show or other talk. From figuring out who they think is new and hot in town recently, etc. This is an organic kind of interaction, a special way of doing business.

Now if you take this culture and spread it around – musicians having left, living in places that are not NOLA, away from this kind of culture. Some because they have to, some because they want to, some just because it happened this way.  Before they may have travelled all summer, but they would always come back to this particular space and its particular culture. Now many participants are gone – what happens? Do they try to maintain a similar way of being, living? They aren’t trying to “preserve” a culture, they seem to be trying to continue existing the way they did “prior to”. In this case, technology falls short maybe because of how it affects the social gray spaces afforded through face-to-face interaction and chance encounters.

Sending someone a message is a very clear expression of intentionality and a direct demand  for attention that can be attenuated in a face-to-face social situation where the space includes other potential interactions and where many actions can be interpreted with a certain amount of latitude. This uncertainty that is built into a meeting at a club – it is now gone. So technology can keep people connected but something is lost and this may contribute to the skeptical attitude. It’s this articulation of who belongs to a community, a list of people rather than a more organic shifting of likes, dislikes and allegiances. It is a shadow of nuances social action – where social actions are more a blunt force than an elegant management of social resources. What does it mean to realize you have a lot of friends or even just know a lot of people after you’ve seen a list of your friends on a peoplefinder website? What does it mean where setting up a gig means several emails and phone calls with H or T or whomever, rather than just dropping by the club for a friends’ gig and then chatting them up about it on an offhand chance they would be interested.

Could Chazfest happen if organized remotely? In NOLA or somewhere else? Is there an attempt to keep the closeness of these relationships and can it be retained if the majority of interactions are suddenly mediated. The community, of course, will have to change because there will be those that are there and those that aren’t and long distance participation  probably won’t cut it anyway, making those that are away, peripheral members regardless of their stations before the move. So what of those that aren’t there? Will they try to keep a snapshot of what was in electronic communication, forming a sort of support group, keeping a shrine? will they move on and forget what they were a part of at some time? Will they try to stay “in touch” and “be a part” by frequent visits and email, etc? Will those that stay feel the lack? Will they compensate by trying to keep relationships up via mediated communication even if this is not the mode of choice?

Abstract for Katrina conference

Submitted Aug 1, 2006

 

The Beats Go On: How New Orleans musicians used communication technologies to maintain personal and professional ties after hurricane.

New Orleans has often been acknowledged for its profound influence on contemporary music. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many expressed concern for the possible loss of the city’s unique music culture. Katrina devastated performance venues, dispersed bands and their audiences, and destroyed instruments. Newspapers suggested that information and communication technologies, such as cell phones and the Internet, played a significant role in helping victims cope with the immediate aftermath of the disaster. This research focuses on how New Orleans musicians used available technologies to reconnect with friends and family, band members, booking personnel and audiences and whether and how they were able to continue their music careers.

We focused on New Orleans musicians for several reasons. First, professional music is a highly collaborative activity between band members, booking agents, and fans. Musicians are likely to have wide social and professional networks that they can access in times of need. Second, we can examine outcomes at three levels—personal, professional, and community. After the hurricane, musicians faced personal challenges during and after evacuation, such as locating friends and family. They then had to reestablish professional connections with each other and with music venues available for performances, and reconnect with the larger New Orleans community of other musicians, audience and fans. Finally, by centering data collection on Jazz Fest 2006, we observed a culturally defining event that drew people back to New Orleans, even those who now resided in other states.

To address the above research themes we conducted 40 interviews with musicians in the city of New Orleans. Teams of two researchers approached musicians at various venues during Jazz Fest 2006 for informal 45-minute interviews. The interviews focused on information and communication technology use before, during and after the hurricane.

Preliminary results suggest that after the hurricane, many musicians shifted from primarily face-to-face communication to technologically mediated communication for connecting with friends and family. Pre-Katrina, many musicians relied upon seeing each other in person throughout the day for conducting business and spreading news. After Katrina they found themselves socially isolated and stranded outside the city. Their immediate need was to locate friends and family and they used both familiar and unfamiliar technologies for the task. Many learned how to text message during the evacuation, even while stuck in traffic leaving the city. Others reported buying cell phones with out of state numbers or relying on email. Several mentioned starting their own people-finder websites where friends and family could post information–a technological form of word-of-mouth, or extensively using NOLA.com to find information about their friends and their neighborhoods.

Although musicians were able to use the same technologies to locate their band members, they then faced challenges reestablishing work. They had to replace lost instruments and equipment, so they applied for grants online and borrowed from other musicians. Yet there was nowhere to play. Many did not have strong enough reputations in cities like Dallas or Memphis to simply call club owners, as they had in New Orleans. Within New Orleans, many venues were destroyed and audiences had dispersed. Some musicians used Myspace pages for promotion and email distribution lists to draw fans. However, new technologies were met with skepticism. Neither cell phones nor the Internet represented a “silver bullet” solution, and websites and Myspace accounts were not expected to be very beneficial. Musicians adopted a “wait and see” attitude, ready to drop adopted technologies if they did not prove useful in rebuilding their lifestyle.

During the study, we interviewed both musicians who had returned to New Orleans and those that were simply visiting, having chosen to live permanently in other states. Throughout the interviews, many musicians expressed sadness for the loss of what used to be a strong, close-knit face-to-face community. Nevertheless, most also expressed optimism in their ability to maintain the close-knit quality of their community through the use of communication technologies, despite the loss of geographical proximity.

need-to-use basis…

So from all this: people used technology in order to satisfy specific needs:

1. need to find each other when they have been thrown out of the cozy face-to-face culture
   1. text messages where cell phones didn’t work to figure out whether people were safe
   2. people finder websites (private sites that people discovered by “word of mouth” as a way to keep track of each other and get back in contact – a way of centralizing what everyone in the community knew but had no other efficient way of telling everyone else
   3. adoption of communication technology in order to continue keeping in touch and to re-establish connections with people that were distant (where they used to be close)
   4. adoption of technology that allowed them to get “back to business” – laptops, cell phones, internet
2. risk averse technology adoption
   1. investing into laptops rather than desktops, into cell phones rather than landlines
   2. keeping technology mobile
3. Skeptical attitude towards technology
   1. Though adoption was rampant, continued use dropped off once things went back to normal for many people
   2. Technology – no silver bullet – “wait and see” attitude regarding its usefulness
   3. Though there were moves towards actually investing more resources, time and effort into various technologies, these were not coupled with high expectations and any benefit from these activities was met with more surprise than anything else.