Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

Publication Title

Media and Communication

Volume

10

Issue

2

ISSN

2183-2439

DOI

10.17645/mac.v10i2.5038

Keywords

disaster recovery; Facebook groups; resilience; social identity; social media; social networks

Abstract

The Camp Fire in California (November 2018) was one of the most destructive wildfires in recorded history. Dozens of Facebook groups emerged to help people impacted by the Camp Fire. Its variety and prevalence throughout recovery make this network of disaster-specific, recovery-oriented social media groups a distinct context for inquiry. Reflexive thematic analysis was performed on 25 interviews with group administrators and publicly available descriptive data from 92 Facebook groups to characterize the composition of the network and explore identity in the groups. Group members’ identities fell into two categories—helpers and survivors—while the groups consisted of six identities: general, specialized, survivor-only, pet-related, location-specific, and adoptive. Administrators established group identity around purpose, through membership criteria, and in similarity and opposition to other Camp Fire Facebook groups. The findings contribute to social identity theory and the communication theory of resilience at the intersection of resilience labor, identity anchors, and communication networks.

Comments

Originally published at https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/5038 under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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