[EAS] The words we use

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

From: EAS <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Bill Ruck <ruck at lns.com>

> What really needs to be done is to identify exactly what emergency information needs to be provided...

Take a look at this White House-sponsored survey of social science knowledge on public warnings: <http://tap.gallaudet.edu/emergency/nov05conference/EmergencyReports/EffectiveDisasterWarnings.pdf>
In particular, take a look at Chapter Six, where you'll find the base document from which the CAP data structure was derived.

>...to exactly what part of the population.  

See Chapter 8 of the same document.  Note, however, that the people who need information about a threat may include people who are physically outside the impact area, but who have compelling interests (kids' schools, business facilities, suppliers, etc.) in the target area.  Thus "location awareness" by the receiving device is really only the starting point for alert message targeting.

> Do this without describing any technology; existing, proposed, or fantasy.

This point is crucial.  It turns out that people of all sorts and affiliations, including people with access and functional needs, require essentially the same data set, which has NOTHING to do either with the hazard type or the technology of alert delivery.  

That's why we designed CAP based not on technology or on particular hazards, but on the most consistent element of the warning system, which is the psychology and sociology of the human recipients of alerts.

>I predict it will not be ONE SIZE FITS ALL.

OK, that's become a bit of a slogan... "don't fence me in," and all that.  On the information content side of things it turns out to be factually incorrect, as noted above.  And on the technological side it confuses the issue of technological diversity with some fuzzy analogy to "size."

The key drivers toward using a mix of technologies (vendor marketing aside) are really three:

1) "Reach and penetration":  No single technology is going to reach everyone at all times, and 

2) "Formative bias":  Each technological medium has characteristic strengths and weaknesses... e.g., 

  *  Television is an essentially dramatic medium, especially powerful for communicating emotion and modeling behavior, but not so good for presentation of specific factual information, which it tolerates only in carefully limited amounts.  

  *  Radio is somewhat less given to "how do you FEEL about this?" emotionality, and is very powerful for attracting/reinforcing attention and communicating timing and tempo, but can quickly overrun people's cognitive buffers when it comes to itemization of facts.  

  *  Text, including print and various digital forms, is good at delivering specific details in a way that lets the recipient supplement memory with the ability to go back over a body of detail.

That's not to say that any medium is ONLY for a particular communication purpose.  The AIR ("attention, information, reassurance") mnemonic for emergency public information reminds us that EVERY act of human communication comprises all three aspects... focus, detail and affect... although not always to the same degree.

The key point here is that it takes a mix of media to express fully all three elements of messaging.

3) "Corroboration": People typically don't act on the first warning message they hear.  They simply don't.  "Normalcy bias," sometimes also known as "denial," is a universal and generally pro-survival trait among humans.  Much depends on context and prior personal experience, but it generally takes at least three different "impressions" of an alert message before people start to take protective action.  This keeps us from doing a Bert-the-Turtle style duck-and-cover at every truck backfire or lightning flash, serving as a damping factor that spares us from continual overreaction to stimuli.  But it does force us to surround the individual recipient in a cloud of multiple reinforcing inputs if we want her/him to take action.

For all three above reasons the question for the warning officer is never, "which system to use?" but rather, "which systems can I add to the mix?"  Not "size" so much as quantity and quality of the blend.

Art