Gestione dei disastri naturali, comunicazione del rischio e social media

The paper contextualizes the disasters social media within the citizen engagement field, due to the penetrating role in socialization processes social media has already achieved, and recalls a research on the relationship between social media and disasters. The article acknowledges social media resilience to damages caused by natural catastrophes, often thanks to mobile devices, and it will analyse functional social media use for disaster relief and crisis management, by exploring their potential and limits when called to support the behaviour and interactions among the environmental emergences management players. The paper will synthetize pros and cons of disaster social media, by highlighting one of the key factors that guarantees their effectiveness in disasters management: the ability to process information and deduce useful and actual facts. The paper will deepen (i) disaster social media users, and (ii) disaster social media uses, underlining goals and peculiarities during the different emergency management phases: Pre-event, Pre-event / Event, Event, Event / Post-event, Post-event, Pre-event / Post-event.