The challenges of communicating crises in digitalised and diverse societies 

Article by Nina Springer, Professor in Communication, Department of Communication, University of Münster.

Everything we know about crises in our society or in the world, we know through the media.^[1] This famous quote by sociologist Niklas Luhmann (here: applied to crises) helps us understand how important a well-thought-out crisis communication on a societal level becomes in the digital age. Public crisis communication allows “eye-to-eye” engagement with citizens only to a certain degree, and their prior experiences with and attitudes toward public institutions play an important role in their interpretation and acceptance of public crisis communication and measures.² At a time when the authority of public institutions is under scrutiny and in many respects being called into question, crisis communication represents an enormous challenge.

Public crisis communication is a (proactive and reactive) form of communication aimed at protecting organizations and citizens from a threat. A crisis is (the perception of) an exceptional situation of instability and insecurity that poses an extraordinary and high risk to organizations and citizens, individually as well as collectively, and that becomes very costly if not carefully managed. Crisis communication serves to protect (the individual and collective) and to correct (their courses of action); it must be understood as a process with different phases that requires preventive actions, crisis management plans, and post-crisis evaluations.^[2]

According to crisis communication scholar W. Timothy Coombs, crises communication comprises three stages: pre-crisis, crisis response, and post-crisis.² In a pre-crisis stage, individual, organizational or societal goals can still be reached, but they are threatened by the (perception of a) crisis that then disrupts this regular course of action. The crisis response entails all communication and action measures intended to manage this disruptive situation. These measures should be evaluated in the post-crisis phase. Ideally, they were successful in correcting the course that led to the (perceived) crisis or they help society set a new course to avoid future harm. These three stages of crisis management and the public attention they are receiving are sometimes depicted as a clock “that marks the crisis attention cycle” (Coombs, 2021, p. 117). The crisis is then said to end when traditional media, as well as users on social media, no longer want to discuss this particular event (p. 117).

However, globalized social media attention cycles can be quite unpredictable^[3]. In this digitized and interactive age, an organization that thought it was in a post-crisis phase can easily find itself back in a pre-crisis phase. Scanning public social media channels (e.g., for users’ attribution of blame) should be a natural part of both preventive and post-crisis evaluation efforts. Moreover, the crisis perception and attention span, and thus the pace of “forgetting,” can be expected to vary across different segments of society. We can expect vulnerable groups to remain in crisis mode longer than those privileged individuals who have the resources to recover and move on. And if we take on a comprehensive perspective, we must understand that we are not just talking about a small segment of societies: The European Union defines as vulnerable persons “[m]inors, unaccompanied minors, disabled people, elderly people, pregnant women, single parents with minor children, victims of trafficking in human beings, persons with serious illnesses, persons with mental disorders and persons who have been subjected to torture, rape or other serious forms of psychological, physical or sexual violence, such as victims of female genital mutilation.”^[4]

Education and empowerment are strategies that generally work well to help all citizens cope with a crisis: Awareness of, knowledge about, and learning appropriate coping skills support constructive management of and adaptation to circumstances that are perceived as unstable, changeable, and threatening. Moreover, the importance of social relationships as a valuable resource for coping with crises is repeatedly highlighted in many different contexts. Therefore, in addition to support in the formation of social networks, two-way communication should be initiated from authorities and take place on a regular basis. However, there is no “one size fits all” solution in crisis communication. To build resilience, each social group should be addressed differently according to its needs. So first, it must be determined which channels reach which social groups and which do not; and how the communication should be set up.

Furthermore, we see that the interrelationships are quite complex. The elderly had been found to be quite resilient when it comes to coping with a pandemic, for example. On the other hand, however, the elderly can be victimized by disinformation more easily because they are less trained in dealing with the modern media and information ecosystem than young people.^[5] In contrast, children grow up in this dense information ecosystem and ideally are developing media skills with the help of educational opportunities, but they need traditional journalistically prepared information in a certain way. Children need positive framing and light-hearted content, want to be informed age-appropriately, but still wish to be taken seriously.^[6]

Overall, we see that public crisis communication struggles with complexity, and even the desired outcome is still conceptually vague. Do we already have a solid understanding of what resilience requires and means for (different groups of) people but also for organizations and society at large? ^[7] How can resilience—or the ability of people and systems to recover—be achieved and sustained at each of these levels? And how can it even be assessed and evaluated? Typically, the post-crisis phase gets short shrift, and assessment is shifted from the policy level to the context of public debate or (critical) scholarship. At this point in time, for instance, we are working through the years of the pandemic. From a crisis communication perspective, these years will certainly not have been in vain—the analysis should reveal routines that can be implemented for future crises of this kind.

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^[1] Luhmann, N. (2000). The reality of the mass media. Stanford University Press.

^[2] See Coombs, W. T. (2010). Parameters for crisis communication. In W. T. Coombs & S. J. Holladay (Eds.), The handbook of crisis communication (pp. 17–53). Wiley Blackwell. Coombs, W. T. (2021). Crisis communication as course correction: Communicative efforts revive goals. In S. Balonas, T. Ruão & M. V. Carrillo (Eds.). Strategic communication in context: Theoretical debates and applied research (pp. 113–130). UMinho Editora/CECS. Shaluf, I. M., Ahmadun, F. L. R., & Mat Said, A. (2003). A review of disaster and crisis. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 12(1), 24–32. Bargain, O., & Aminjonov, U. (2020). Trust and compliance to public health policies in times of COVID-19. Journal of Public Economics, 192, article 104316. Devine, D., Gaskell, J., Jennings, W., & Stoker, G. (2021). Trust and the coronavirus pandemic: What are the consequences of and for trust? An early review of the literature. Political Studies Review, 19(2), 274–285.

^[3] Lörcher, I., & Neverla, I. (2015). The dynamics of issue attention in online communication on climate change. Media and Communication, 3(1), 17–33. Waldherr, A. (2018). Modelling issue-attention dynamics in a hybrid media system. In P. Vasterman (ed.), From media hype to Twitter storm: News explosions and their impact on issues, crises, and public opinion (pp. 291–311). Amsterdam University Press.

^[4] https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migration-network-emn/emn-asylum-and-migration-glossary/glossary/vulnerable-person_en

^[5] Fuller, H. R., & Huseth-Zosel, A. (2021). Lessons in resilience: Initial coping among older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Gerontologist, 61(1), 114–125. Rocha, Y. M., de Moura, G. A., Desidério, G. A., de Oliveira, C. H., Lourenço, F. D., & de Figueiredo Nicolete, L. D. (2021). The impact of fake news on social media and its influence on health during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review. Journal of Public Health, online first, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-021-01658-z.

^[6] Alon-Tirosh, M., & Lemish, D. (2014). “If I was making the news”: What do children want from news? Participations, 11(1), 108–129. 

^[7] Resilience is an important area of research in psychology, which is why individual resilience is already well-researched (see https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience). However, the meso- and macro-perspectives still require a lot more attention.