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On August 23rd, 2011, at approximately 2:00 p.m. local time a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck the state of Virginia within the United States (U.S.) —38 mi (61 km) northwest of the city of Richmond. The earthquake was felt across more than a dozen U.S. states on the eastern coast and several Canadian provinces. In less than a minute, the first tweets appeared about the event. The first tweet simply read, “Earthquake in Richmond” (Crooks, Croitoru, Stefanidis, & Radzikowski, 2013). In ideal conditions, it may be possible for tweets to be read about a seismic event 2.5 seconds before the seismic waves reach others (Allain, 2011).
About 200 miles away inside a classroom at a Penn State University, students felt the earthquake. Their first reaction was to ask other students in the class, “Hey is this an earthquake?” No alarm sounded and they did not receive any messaging from authorities about the earthquake for almost 10 minutes. Therefore, the students did not immediately follow evacuation procedures. Instead, they grabbed their phones, laptops, and tablets and began to search for verification that they were experiencing an earthquake. They turned to social media like Facebook and Twitter, not the United States Geological Survey or mobile apps devoted to earthquakes. They also called and texted friends and family seeking additional information and asking if their contacts were okay. The students spent four minutes seeking and exchanging information before they moved to evacuate.
While this earthquake was relatively mild (5.8) and may not have prompted the students to react in fear, it nonetheless illustrates an interesting phenomenon: the students sought confirmation from local and non-local sources before taking action. They sought to verify if there really was an emergency, how close was it, how severe, and finally, instructions to act. In addition, during this moment of verification, some of the students served as verifiers. The authors call this information seeking and exchange behavior The Verification Pause.
While the term is new, the intent to seek verification after receiving an emergency warning is not (Dow & Cutter, 2012; Mileti & Peek, 2000). However, in the past individuals were limited in their ability to both receive notifications and participate in verifying that information by the limits of communication technology. Before electronic communications, warnings were given by word of mouth or community bell or horn. Verification often occurred by word of mouth and required physical proximity. Later, warnings were given via broadcast media such as radio and television with which the receiver could not interact. These systems are still active today.
More recently, emergency notifications come from multiple sources. These sources are often combinations of social media, broadcast media news, public websites, blogs, applications, carrier alerts, text messages, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions. Many of these sources provide for interactive discussions and do not require physical proximity. While these new information and communication technologies (ICTs) expand access to information and communication capabilities, the authors also speculate that as the number of potential points of interaction have risen, the potential for the verification pause to be extended to dangerous lengths also rises.
The question that drives this research is: “How do interactions through new media (such as social media and other online sites) affect the verification pause?”
New communication behaviors have changed the nature of the verification pause, making the pause more pronounced and potentially far more problematic than it was. Understanding the pause is important because it has the potential to hold back physical action. This could cost lives in critical moments as individuals might not seek shelter, evacuate, or don protective gear until it is too late. The research presented here contextualizes the verification pause by examining how a classroom of college students sought, provided, and verified information before following evacuation procedures during the 2011 Virginia earthquake.