#audience #researchers #teachers (2)

The final chapter also gives new directions for researchers interested in analyzing social media systems as better networks for communication in recent disaster response efforts. We might look back to the massacres at Virginia Tech, a brief disaster for which instant messaging, texting, or Google talk proved more useful to the network during and directly after the disaster, whereas Facebook was used to memorialize victims post-disaster (Potts, 2013, p. 104). More recently, we might study the impressive, people-powered data that surfaced on Reddit prior to the mainstream media wresting information from these grassroots networks, validating and presenting that information as the media’s original findings (p. 106). Scenarios such as those are presented, but with limited analysis or problematizing. Readers are left to infer whether or not Liza Potts (2014) considered the mainstream media righteous or wrong for relying on the information reported by actors in social media networks. Hearing her position on these issues would have been preferential, and it might have sparked more dialogue among scholarly readers on the ethical implications of mainstream media networks borrowing from social media networks.