The co-constitution of communications and interconnectivty in cross-infrastrucuture disasters (resent)

I

It’s not news that robust communications are pivotal in establishing and ensuring situational awareness and a common operating picture in major emergencies.

For us though, communications are robust when they enable and enact the shifts in interconnectivity configurations so as to match real-time capabilities to dynamic emergency demands.

The willingness and ability to revert to and use different communication technologies in order to shift configurations of sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivities is, we believe, under-acknowledged when it comes to disaster demands and responses.[1]

II

Please note the phrase, “robust.” It does not privilege or prioritize one type of interconnectivity—like face-to-face or voice-to-voice reciprocal interactions in field improvisations—over other types.

One cannot, for example, overstress the importance to enhancing both requisite variety and positive redundancy via activation of serial dependencies in shifting to contact trees and notification protocols in an emergency. “Like if I email you, and you don’t reply, I’ll call you, right? Or if I call you and you don’t pick up, I’ll text you,” a state resilience officer told us, adding: “Like if there’s an emergency happens, I call Chris. If Chris doesn’t answer. I call Coop. If Coop doesn’t answer, I call Abby. If Abby doesn’t answer, I call the governor directly. . .”

III

So what?

The way people communicate in an emergency constitutes the way they connect, and this co-constituted communication/interconnectivity, which makes things happen, means that different configurations of interconnectivity are often tied to different communications mechanisms and technologies. Otherwise you would not have sufficient requisite variety to match dynamic demands with real-time response capabilities.

[1] For more on these different types of interconnectivity configurations in pastoralist setting, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/27/when-interconnections-are-the-center-of-analysis-and-management-the-case-of-pastoralist-systems-and-interconnected-infrastructures-upon-which-they-depend/