How did people use ICT services during the severe disaster?
There were mixed reports about the actual use of and demand from people for the internet, mobile phones, Twitter and other social network services. In metropolitan Tokyo and the surroundings, where the earthquake also hit, shutting down most trains in the afternoon and evening, many people used mobile phones and the internet: email, Twitter, Ustream, YouTube, Google and Facebook. These were, we thought, mostly used in the Tokyo area, but not in the heavily damaged and devastated areas of the Tohoku region.
Later, in early April, when we organised a field visit to the Tohoku region, including the cities of Iwaki, Sendai, Natori and Kesen’numa, to see what exactly happened, many people we met told us stories that were different to those we had heard in Tokyo, confirming our expectations. These were some of their comments:
“None of the digital or analogue media worked at all.”
“Mobile phones were just useless. I tried to call my family members to find out if they were okay. But it didn’t connect. When we got through, busy signals were the answers.”
“Eventually we lost battery power. Since the main power lines were totally down for days, we could not recharge the power, and so within a few hours, we lost it.”
“TVs? Come on! When there is no electricity, how can you get to see the TV programmes?”
“Twitter? Facebook? You are kidding! We were simply not in that mode. Just stunned by the horrible situation; watching the tsunami waves, could not do anything.”
To be fair, all the stories, both about what happened in Tokyo and what happened in Tohoku, were largely true. But they were just many tips of a large iceberg, we felt.
A survey on people’s information behaviour
Because of this, a survey on people’s informational behaviour was carried out by iSPP in July. It was a combination of a web-based online questionnaire, which received 2,815 responses, and personal interviews with 186 interviewees, both conducted with respondents in the devastated areas. The questions were as follows:
Which tools and media were useful? Which were not?
Which information resources did affected people rely on?
Were there any differences given the different locations of the disaster?
Was internet or Twitter really useful?
What kind of lessons can we draw from this?
The respondents were residents of three prefectures in the Tohoku region: Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima. All have coastal areas where the tsunami hit heavily and inland areas where the earthquake hit badly, and people in Iwate especially were also exposed to the danger of the nuclear contamination. There were 5.7 million residents in these three prefectures.
To our knowledge, this was the first attempt at a sizable survey conducted inside the devastated areas in terms of finding out people’s informational behaviour.
At the time of writing, we are still processing the data and writing the full report, but some of the early findings from the online survey have been released already. Here is the summary.