The Use of the Internet and Web-Based Technology
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Print Media and the Misrepresentation of
Damages:
This finding emerged in various studies of the earthquake by Eugenie Rovai, Susan Place, and myself, when we did a simple linear regression of place name mentions in the dominant English and Spanish language regional newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and La Opinión, against damaged buildings inspected by the Los Angeles City Department of Building and Safety (1994). Variation in actual damages by the 36 named communities within the City of Los Angeles accounted for 34 percent of the variation in media coverage, a highly significant (prob= 0.0001) if weak relationship (e.g., Rodrigue, Rovai, and Place 1997). Concentrating on the 17 communities with large residuals above (8) and below (9) the regression line of expected coverage, we found that the grossly overcovered communities were 61.2 percent non-Hispanic white and had population-weighted per capita incomes of $26,069; grossly under-covered communities were only 21.7 percent non-Hispanic white and had weighted per capita incomes of only $14,145 (based on data from the 1990 U.S. Census). Furthermore, mental maps of the disaster were elicited from a random sample of 245 people in the region, of whom 52 actually responded to the survey, and they accorded nearly perfectly with the media geography rather than with the actual pattern of damage (the media geography accounted for 95 percent of the variation in residents' mental maps, prob=0.0000) (Rodrigue, Rovai, and Place 1997). Most disturbingly, areas that were disproportionately overcovered were recovering at a rate significantly higher than the areas that were disproporionately undercovered. That is, red-tagged buildings were being bulldozed and removed from the database and yellow-tagged buildings were being repaired, re-inspected, and then placed in the green-tagged (safe for routine human occupancy) category much faster (-41.9 percent from 26 April to 12 August) than in the rest of the city and especially faster than in the areas undercovered by the two newspapers (-33.8 percent, the difference having a prob-value of 0.0003). Skewing of coverage by traditional print media, then, has serious ramifications for people's understanding of and perceptions of a hazard situation or disastrous event and for the equity of response, recovery, and reconstruction.
Misrepresentation of Wildfire Risk: Chaparral is a fire-dependent scrub vegetation, which typically occupies the steepest slopes and most skeletal soils in the mountainous areas of California. The leaves are sclerophyllous and oily and resist decay upon falling from the shrubs. As the plants age, the ratio between dead wood and active stems and twigs increases. The accumulation of these fuels sets the stage for brushfire (Minnich 1988; Schoenherr 1992; Vankat 1979). As a result of this accumulation, the longer the period since a fire, the greater both the probability and the magnitude of the next fire. In such a fire-dependent vegetation system, residential construction and occupation necessarily expose certain people to the destructive potential of a natural event, which is thereby transformed into a natural hazard or even outright disaster (Biswell 1974; Cooper 1922; Minnich 1988). For whatever reason, hillside residence is highly valued by the dominant Anglo-American culture (Gillard 1980). In the ensuing competition for suitable building sites and dwellings, the value of such homes and lots is bid up out of reach of households of modest means. It is the well-to-do, then, who have the resources to act on the cultural preference for hillside residence (Aschmann 1959). While the benefits of hillside homes with views are, thus, narrowly privatized, the cost of firefighting is socialized among all the taxpayers of whichever governmental jurisdiction(s) engage(s) any particular fire. Similarly, holders of home insurance policies across the State of California subsidize the fire insurance premia of homeowners in the pyrogenic hillsides through the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, an assigned risk pool that provides "affordable" fire insurance to those in very high-risk areas normally redlined by the insurance industry. The result of firefighting taxes and FAIR Plan fire insurance is, thus, a hidden upward income transfer in the form of a social subsidy to wealthier households able to act on the environmentally dysfunctional preference for homes with a view. This situation has been appreciated for decades by biogeographers, ecologists, botanists, hazards researchers, and the insurance industry in California. It became more widely known when Mike Davis, a caustic observer of Los Angeles' social and environmental scene, began to publicize the wildfire hazard cycle in a series of inflammatory articles in the alternative L.A. Weekly and other progressive venues and then as a chapter in his book, The Ecology of Fear. The publication of this book, with its chapter, "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," together with his MacArthur Foundation genius grant, was quickly followed by an astoundingly ad hominem attack on his character for having done so. A media firestorm erupted in October 1998, which in many ways echoes the long literary tradition in Los Angeles of battles between L.A. development boosters and those with a darker vision of the city. Leading the charge against Davis was one Brady Westwater, who began the controversy by posting a large web page (http://www.burnbox.com/westwater.html) to accuse Davis of "error, deception and mistakes" in his research. Westwater then argued that, because of "the replacement of old wood shake roofed houses with fire resistant structures, better fire truck access, brush clearance and the installation of up to date water lines, the fire damages will greatly decrease over the years" in Malibu. "Brady Westwater" turns out to be Ross Ernest Shockley, a realtor in Malibu, whose living depends on selling those structures in the chaparral. The "Westwater" web page then became the basis for print media attacks by L.A. boosters. The first of these was David Friedman, a former real-estate executive and continuing consultant with the Catellus Development Corporation, who writes an urban affairs column in the throwaway L.A. Downtown News. Friedman publicized the "Westwater" web page. This story then served as the basis of an article by Jill Stewart in the L.A. New Times, a newer rival to the L.A. Weekly. The story from there was then picked up in national and international print and web-based media: The Economist, the New York Times, Salon (a web-based magazine), Suck (another web-based magazine), and, somewhat belatedly, the L.A. Times (itself historically the premier L.A. booster outlet). Lost in the invective has been any sense of the risk to which wealthy home buyers in the montane suburbs of California are subjecting themselves, their families, and their prized possessions, not to mention the social inequities in paying for their inevitable losses. An understanding of the fuel cycle and the changes in time of probabilities and magnitudes of future fires never penetrated public understanding as long as it was confined to the professional writings of life scientists and social scientists writing for their peers (e.g., Biswell 1974; Cook 1993; Cooper 1922; Minnich 1988; Pyne 1998; Rodrigue 1993). That same understanding, delivered forcefully to a broader public audience by an able and entertaining author, engendered a firestorm of protest by a handful of individuals with direct interests in continuing suburban development of the fire frontier. It is possible that the treatment of Mike Davis by those with a stake in his message may discourage others from popular discourse to inform policy toward development on the fire-fringe and private perception of this and other hazards. This controversy highlights the empowerment of private individuals by the Internet, in this case, the web. In this case, an uncredentialed individual negatively impacted by Davis' message of chaparral fire hazard in Malibu bypassed media reports on basically positive views of Davis' message in professional communities. By placing his detailed critique of Mike Davis in general and Davis' comments on fire hazard in particular on the web, "Westwater" reached a few key individuals in the popular print and Internet media. These were, in turn, able to drown out the key message of chaparral fire hazard in a sea of contumely against Davis. Private development proceeds apace, socially subsidized through fire-fighting taxes and the affordable premia of the FAIR Plan, and hillside homeowners continue to take on risk they do not clearly perceive or fully understand.
A One-Citizen Caveat Emptor Campaign on the
Web: This case involves the slump of a 25 acre hillslope on the 16th and 17th of January 1993 in a neighborhood of luxury homes on view sites in the Anaheim Hills of Orange County, one of the suburbs to the southeast of Los Angeles proper. This development was built in 1973 on known ancient landslides that had experienced some sliding in the early 1960s. A few dozen families were evacuated and more than 200 were affected by other symptoms of ground slippage, so 280 households sued the City of Anaheim. The legal firm they engaged had won a similar suit elsewhere in Southern California, so the residents expected to be made whole for the loss of their homes or the costs of structural repairs and mitigations. The situation exposed a loophole in real-estate disclosure laws in California, which allows sellers and realtors not to disclose areas of significant landslide hazard, if they have been mitigated. One deeply angry victim, Gerald Steiner, took to the Internet after the slump occurred despite dewatering wells, so the character of his activism is ex-post facto. His intent is to publicize the political context of the landslide hazard, rather than to debunk the popularization of a hazard as "Brady Westwater" sought to do with Mike Davis' writing on chaparral fire hazard in Malibu. Steiner's web site has several foci. The author wishes to expose the prior knowledge of landslide hazard on the part of elected city government officials and, therefore, their culpability in what he characterizes as failure to disclose. He seeks to educate others on the nature of landslide hazards in the region and provide them with one stop access to USGS, FEMA, and California Division of Mines and Geology information and maps they can peruse before making offers on homes in Orange County. Another purpose is to provide a forum for other victims of the slides to share their stories and to stay abreast of current developments in their legal actions against the City of Anaheim. The site casts light on a loophole in the disclosure process that contributes to a faulty hazard perception on the part of residents and potential residents. It also yields an informative if jaundiced perspective on the dialogue between geological risk assessment and the very political process of risk management decision-making in local governmental bodies, a process that in this case exposed a lot of people unawares to a potentially lethal and financially devastating hazard. In a rather disturbing development for First Amendment rights, the City tried to close down the web site, saying that the site is full of misinformation. The site is obviously one-sided, but it also brings together a tremendous amount of landslide and earthquake hazard information and maps that would normally never occur to a home buyer to ask about, especially if notice of a mitigated slide is not required to be in the hazards disclosure statement. Steiner has said that his site helps level the public-opinion playing field between the neighbors and the city, with its team of top attorneys. As he puts it, "I think in future, political action will be a basic part of the Internet." There is an equity dimension to this controversy that is quite hidden from Steiner, however. These people are like hazards victims everywhere in the poignancy of their individual sufferings. Unlike victims of, say, mudslides in Central America or Appalachia, however, they have been able to publicize their own stories through the access of one of their own to web-authoring skills and domain-hosting resources. The appalling losses of these at least originally very prosperous households are out there, courtesy of their command of financial and educational resources. Others like them with access to the Internet can learn from their tragedies and begin to insulate themselves from the potential devastation of landslide hazards in the view lots of Southern California. Other victims suffer silently, uninformed of their risk exposure, stricken by disaster, unable to get their own stories out, and overlooked by society: Herman's and Chomsky's "unworthy" victims (1988). While the Internet has empowered the originally well-to-do victims of this particular event to publicize their sufferings and generally expose the failure of municipal risk management policy, the ensuing publicity has not to date made them whole for losses they never realized they were assuming, at least in Gerald Steiner's opinion. The affected homeowners accepted an award of about $32,000-36,000 per household. They have also been forced into a Geological Hazard Abatement District (GHAD) to self-fund the dewatering wells that did not originally protect them at an estimated cost of $5,000 per year after the start-up money by the City of Anaheim runs out in a few years. The existence of a GHAD exonerates the municipality from legal culpability in a future recurrence of the hazard. So, effectiveness of communication does not necessarily translate into legal or political success. The ultimate success of this foray into Internet communication may be measured in a few people learning to look beyond real- estate disclosures for more information on hazards they may be taking on. This long-term success, however, is limited by the requirement that an audience stumble into or actively search for the site. The Steiner site was initially successful for the same reason that the "Westwater" site was: Traditional print media journalists (in this case, Ann Pepper of the Orange County Register and a "Top 10 Web Site Award" from the alternative O.C. Weekly) found the site and decided to publicize it, thereby generating "hit traffic" for it. So, despite the use of the Internet in this hazard debate, the author ultimately remains dependent on the traditional print and broadcast media. His story was newsworthy for the short attention span of traditional media for the same reasons any traditional media story is newsworthy: Sensation, human conflict and drama, and a class of victim likely to be appealing to the very similar demographic segment advertisers generally try to target. So, though both "Westwater" and Steiner have stepped into the frontier of Internet political activism, one to debunk a very real hazard and one to expose a concealed hazard, in many ways their use of the Internet is just an adjunct to the traditional media communication channels. Because of the audience-active requirement of the web, these stories remain subject to the same limitations on political communication that any other story dependent on traditional media is. They have to attract traditional media attention.
The Exponential Power of the Forward Button: Launched in October of 1997 and currently encountering Jupiter, the Cassini orbiter will spend four years on tour in the Saturn system beginning in 2004 and drop the European Huygens probe onto its largest moon, Titan. This is physically the largest and scientifically the most ambitious mission ever undertaken by NASA or its European partners (Spilker 1997). A controversy erupted over the mission, however, as a result of NASA's decision to utilize radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and thermal units (RHUs) to generate electrical power for the instruments and to keep them at operating temperature: They contain ceramicized plutonium-238 dioxide. Another, related point of controversy was the trajectory getting Cassini from Earth to Saturn, which entailed a gravity assist around Earth in August of 1999 (NASA 1995, 1997; Chong 1997; Grossman 1996; Hoffman 1997; Kaku 1997). The movement to abort the launch and, later, the Earth swingby was unsuccessful in stopping either of these events, but it did generate an enormous amount of controversy and pressure on Congress. The movement did not achieve its goals, but it did succeed in making RTG and RHU use controversial, which may affect the design, authorization, and funding of future missions (GAO 1998). Besides a number of print media and television pieces on the controversy, most of the day-to-day activism took place on e-mail and listservers and on UseNet, as well as on the web. This controversy, then, sheds light on the use of audience-passive Internet pathways. I decided to concentrate on UseNet, because it is archived by DéjaNews in a fully searchable form. I went through the nearly 20,000 messages posted on "Cassini" from April 1995 through March 1999, developing a sample of 937 authors of 8,020 messages on the controversy. The authors were classified by concerns they raised and whether their messages were original compositions or simply forwards from someone else. I expected opponents to dominate discussion, because their concerns are emotionally more compelling than the motives of mission proponents. Instead, I found that the great majority of authors were supportive of the mission: 60 percent were supporters; 21 percent were opponents; and 20 percent were neutral. I analyzed the concerns of authors in all three positions to understand what drew them to the social debate over Cassini. Opponents were dominated by three subtypes: (1) 24 percent simply passed on messages originating from about half a dozen people or organizations, often without comment; (2) another 24 percent wrote independent expressions of concern about the risks of plutonium in general or during the launch and flyby phases of this mission in particular; and (3) 21 percent were people interested in Nostradamus and astrology, who expressed great fear that Cassini was the "King of Terror" that Nostradamus had predicted would come from the skies and destroy Earth in summer of 1999. Proponents, given their much larger numbers, discussed a wider range of issues and concerns, with no one issue commanding as many as a fifth of the authors. The most common statement (17 percent) was that the opposition was very small if very vocal and unqualified to comment. Sixteen percent opined that the risk of the mission or of RTGs was being grossly overstated. Thirteen percent simply enthused about the mission and its goals. Another 10 percent engaged in rather nasty "flaming" of the opponents. Only 6 percent forwarded on other people's or organizations' messages, usually something from the JPL publicity office. As expected in any nuclear issue, dread was the main thrust in this hazards debate. Two thirds of opponents expressed dread of nuclear contamination, and the Nostradamus discussants were terrified that Cassini would bring about the predicted end of the world. Over a quarter of the proponents addressed the dread factor, too, mainly by trivializing the probability of an accident and the consequences of an accident should one occur. Given that the forwarding of messages was such a large part of the anti- Cassini UseNet traffic, I tracked the sources of the messages that were being forwarded. They originated with about a half dozen individuals! The Cassini controversy thus demonstrates the empowerment the Internet offers to political activists, if the channels chosen include those not dependent on an active audience. Using e-mail, UseNet, or chats, a handful of people can alert others to an issue of concern and enlist them to spread the news. The population passively receiving these notices expands exponentially and, even if a small percentage of those exposed to the idea responds politically, the result can be tremendous political pressure (Weldon 1997). Potentially very empowering to ordinary citizens, this kind of audience-passive Internet communication offers a counterweight to the political power of great corporations and wealthy individuals, which normally dominate the traditional print and broadcast media due to the cost of entry. Democratization is the great strength of the Internet. The demagogic use of the Internet, however, remains the shadow of democratic empowerment. As in the two other Internet-mediated cases, appeals to conspiracies, ad hominem attacks, exaggeration, and other emotionally-manipulative devices are abundant in the Cassini debate, particularly among the opponents but also among flame-prone proponents. The complex nature of Cassini and of many other both technological and natural hazard controversies makes it inaccessible to the average citizen, who yet must decide whether to act politically about this or similar situations or, worse, for a democratic society, remain uninformed and apathetic. This is a dilemma we all face as citizens, scientists or not: We have to make political judgments, and we don't have the time to look into issues far from our training. So, we have shortcuts to opinions -- we tend to defer to the opinions of people and organizations we trust. New media make it possible for a handful of people to hijack this mechanism of trust and, through the ease and exponential expansion of activism-by-the-forward button, mobilize a lot of us into a politically potent movement over a possibly trivial hazard. |
Discussion
Limitations of Traditional Media in Hazards Debates
Hazard assessors, emergency managers, and disaster planners face difficulties with the conventional media both in the predisaster phase and in the various post-disaster phases. Getting media attention often depends on the existence of sensational human drama and conflict in the story, rather than on the science and the information needs of society. Risk assessors and disaster planners are at a disadvantage in getting their messages across to the public: They do not control the media, and the concerns of the media do not always dovetail with theirs. Activists share this disadvantage. They, too, do not control the media. Unlike scientists and planners, however, they are better able to generate the kinds of hook events that might snag coverage: They can stage demonstrations or publicize allegations of risk coverups.
In short, traditional print and broadcast media wring out the sensation and drama in a disastrous event or hazardous situation and then move on to other, more "newsworthy" stories, leaving information needs unmet. Such media are out of the control of scientists, emergency managers, and disaster planners. Activists are only marginally more capable of hooking coverage.
The Internet in Hazards Communication
One way to slip information past the control of traditional media decision-makers is to take to the Internet. The Internet requires a vanishingly small price of entry compared with that required in the highly oligopolistic conventional media. It is also growing explosively, if unevenly. This paper has shown that the different Internet channels vary in their ability to bypass the traditional print and broadcast media to get information directly out to the public at large. Audience-active channels, notably web pages, are less effective ways for scientists, planners, and activists to access the public unless they are coupled with other Internet channels or, indeed, the traditional media. This limitation is seen in the "Westwater" and Steiner campaigns. Audience-passive channels uniquely bypass dependence on traditional media. These channels include e-mail, UseNet, and chats. The Cassini case shows the power of exponential expansion through these audience-passive channels.
Risk management decision-makers, particularly politicians, would be well-reminded that they may be hearing from an unrepresentative selection of their voting and contributing constituents in hazards debates, as in many other issues. This sample may be responding to demagoguery, self-interest, or the rational consideration of risks and benefits: The source of political pressure may not be too apparent when decision-makers consider policy to manage a hazard. While one would hope they rely on risk assessment science in framing their responses, they must do so in an atmosphere of political risk and uncertainty, with its own Type I and Type II hazards to their own careers!
Quality of Content on the "Infobahn"
Henry W. Fischer pointed out a "...greater likelihood of the diffusion of inappropriate disaster relevant information ... The inherent advantage of democratisation provided by the Internet through the levelling of hierarchies also creates at least one unintended consequence. Those who are truly expert may appear equal to those who have no background in the field" (1999). Peer- review is not the norm on the Internet!
In the chaparral fire case, the Internet was used to circumvent widespread professional accord with the conclusions of Mike Davis about the seriousness of the wildfire hazard and the rôle of development interests. A realtor in Malibu used the web to debunk Davis' attempts to publicize the fire hazard in Malibu. In the Cassini plutonium case, the Internet was used to portray a handful of scientists credentialed in other areas than spacecraft design and outer solar system planetary science as experts in these areas. These individuals, speaking outside peer-reviewed channels, lent an aura of authority to statements that Cassini had a significant probability of killing 200,000-20,000,000 people.
Fairness of Access to the Internet
Traditional media show marked biases in their coverage of a hazard or disaster due to advertiser needs, reporter demographics, bottom line requirements of parent corporations, and editorial approach. Democratization of the Internet, by dropping the cost of entry, would seem to have the potential of remedying this. Unfortunately, socio-economic bias remains in the Internet media and affects social organizing on the Internet. The Cassini activists are middle and professional class people, as are "Brady Westwater" and Gerald Steiner. Online civic action empowers individuals already privileged in this society. The potential of democratic oversight of risk management through cyberspace awaits the effective arrival of people traditionally marginalized in hazards coverage and decision-making: the poor, minorities, working class people, and, at least in the case of Cassini, women (who made up only 4.5 percent of UseNet authors).
Conclusions
Standards in hazard assessment science are, thus, inherently political choices. It is a policy decision to manage a hazard to promote human safety and accept opportunity costs or to manage it so as to minimize opportunity costs of regulation and accept lower levels of human safety. Assessment science and management policy must inform one another, and the relationship is unavoidably controversial.
Do we permit development of particularly hazardous hillsides at the cost of endangering human lives and at the cost of a sizable social subsidy? or do we limit development in chaparral and landslide-prone slopes by imposing opportunity costs on developers and on homeowners who want to enjoy view properties?
What's the geographical limit to this line of criticism? Virtually the whole State of California is one big mélange of hazards ... and specific hazards affect other particular places: the hurricane coast, the Mississippi floodplain, the tornado belt, and the snowbelt. Given that there are good reasons to occupy hazardous areas, hazard assessment needs at least to specify the spatial and social distribution of hazard risk, and policy might want at least to make sure that victims of disaster are treated equitably and efficiently in response, restoration, and recovery.
The technological hazard case of Cassini raises issues of expert qualification, acceptability of risk, and the tension between democracy and demagoguery in cyberspace. Independent risk assessment of the plutonium on board Cassini deemed the hazard vanishingly tiny in probability and relatively trivial in consequence. This assessment did not mollify those who deeply dread nuclear technology in any form whatsoever, and they found experts to claim high probabilities of disaster and extremely serious consequences.
As this battle raged on in the listservers, chat rooms, and UseNet groups, it had all the appearance of dueling risk assessment experts. Expertise was, thus, delegitimated and people encountering the messages over the issue were left to their own resources to decide if Cassini were a mortal danger or not.
Most of us are without the specialized training to decide issues of this sort on our own and we lack the time to look into it further. Many message recipients made up their minds on the recommendations of their reference groups and took political action on their recommendations.
The Cassini controversy is particularly interesting in the effectiveness of the audience-passive Internet channels on which it was carried out. Activists on both sides were able to get their messages out without reliance on conventional print and broadcast media (though those were also involved as the human drama and conflict over the launch escalated). The half dozen or so original Cassini opponents were staggeringly effective in exploiting the exponential growth possibilities of chain-mail Internet communication.
Whatever one might think of the various participants in the Cassini, chaparral fire, and Anaheim Hills landslide controversies, there is much to be learned from them about the communication of hazard assessment and the generation of political pressure on the hazard management policy decision-making process. The Internet changes everything. Its low cost of entry enables the circumvention of media priorities and biases in coverage ... and of professional peer review: Activists can directly communicate with the public through a variety of channels.
This communication enables the recruitment of activists and thus generates a lot of political pressure on the already inherently political process of hazard management. Hazard management policy in many ways governs which hazard assessment science is done and the standards by which a hazard is deemed worthy of intervention. So, the Internet will impact risk assessment scientists in all the geosciences and biosciences, indirectly by its impact on policy and directly, in some cases, by delegitimating the conclusions of risk assessment science (Mike Davis' tribulations and the Cassini controversy come to mind).
How, then, can risk assessment scientists make sure their own voices are
heard? First, make your own work available on the web. The active Internet
audience then has access to responsible expertise in a hazards question of
interest.
Second, risk assessment scientists or the agencies for which they work need to
cultivate ongoing ties with the conventional media, who do appreciate knowing
who the experts in a given hazard are and how to contact them as a story
breaks. Kate Hutton at Caltech and Lucy Jones at USGS model this approach to
effective media communication. Web communication is enhanced by conventional
media driving traffic to a web site.
Third, to take full advantage of the exponential growth in audience offered by
the Internet, it is well worthwhile to subscribe to a variety of listservers
and UseNet groups with some popular interest in one's area of science
expertise. Relevant activist "spin" can be monitored and, if necessary,
corrected or countered.
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document maintained by author
© Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D., 2000
last revised: 12/16/00