Bursting Pipes and Boiling Snow: Disaster Impacts and Adaptations in the 2021 Texas Power Crisis from the Lens of Short-Form Social Media Videos
Date
2025-02-05
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Disaster Studies
Abstract
This article explores how short-form social media videos can contribute to the understanding of how people are affected by and adapt to crisis events. Applying a grounded approach, we analyzed 174 crisis-related videos shared by local Twitter users during the 2021 Texas storm and power crisis to determine how crisis impacts and adaptations are documented and portrayed. Our data include fifty-six cross-posted videos from third-party platforms, of which forty-one were from TikTok. We show that short-form videos are capable of providing wide-ranging insights into the impacts of crisis events and how people adapt to them. We provide examples with rich detail to illustrate how content creators documented the effects of their adaptations and their downstream effects. Our data include various adaptations that address the need for water, food, and shelter/warmth. Furthermore, we identify how people coped with the crisis through entertaining and humorous videos. We discovered that valuable information about crisis impacts and adaptations often appeared in the periphery of the main focus of videos. We also comment on what was missing in the social media record (e.g., more mundane impacts and adaptations), contributing to understandings about the contours and limitations of social media content in a crisis context.
Description
This article was originally published in Journal of Disaster Studies. The version of record is available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/950741.
© 2024 Alexa Schlein, Shengzhi Wang, Valerie Remaker, Ziyun Tie, Melinda M. Haughey, Rachel A. Davidson, James Kendra and Kate Starbird.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY NC-ND 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Keywords
social media, qualitative methods, crisis informatics, videos, disaster adaptations
Citation
Schlein, Alexa, et al. "Bursting Pipes and Boiling Snow: Disaster Impacts and Adaptations in the 2021 Texas Power Crisis from the Lens of Short-Form Social Media Videos." Journal of Disaster Studies 1, no. 2 (2024): 220-248. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/950741.