Hamilton Bean

The Study of Mobile Public Warning Messages: A Research Review and Agenda

In 2011, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began authorizing emergency management officials to broadcast Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) to cellular phones and other mobile devices to help notify people of imminent hazards. WEAs are 90-characters long, geographically targeted emergency messages sent by government alerting authorities through the nations mobile telecommunications networks, which, for the first time, allow officials to directly notify at-risk publics where they live and work. The use of WEAs has outpaced investigation of their benefits, limitations, and actual and potential consequences. To address this critical gap in scholarship and public understanding, we integrate literature from the fields of public warning, instructional crisis communication, and mobile health communication. Combining these literatures, we outline a theoretical and applied communication research agenda for public warning messages delivered over mobile devices.

Disaster Warnings in Your Pocket: How Audiences Interpret Mobile Alerts for an Unfamiliar Hazard

This study investigates how people interpret Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) and Twitter‐length messages (‘tweets’) delivered over mobile devices for an unfamiliar hazard. Specifically, through four (N = 31) focus groups and 31 think‐out‐loud interviews, participants’ understanding of, belief in and personalisation of WEAs and tweets were assessed for a mock improvised nuclear device detonation in a major U.S. metropolitan area. While participants offered a wide variety of interpretations, WEAs and tweets were often deemed confusing, difficult to believe and impersonal. Participants also consistently found WEAs and tweets to be fear inducing and uninformative. The findings compel improvements in the way that WEAs and tweets are currently written, as well as indicate future directions for applied risk and crisis communication theory development.

Deconstituting al-Qa’ida: CCO Theory and the Decline and Dissolution of Hidden Organizations

This study reconceptualizes the decline and dissolution of hidden organizations using the four flows model of constitutive communication. Analyzing internal al-Qa’ida documents captured during the 2011 U.S. raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama Bin Laden, this study explains how losses of control over the flows of membership negotiation, self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning have both reflected and reinforced al-Qa’ida’s decline. Interventions inspired by a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective are proposed as a way to accelerate al-Qa’ida’s dissolution. The implications of the four flows model for both counterterrorism strategy and theorizing hidden organizations are discussed.

Rhetorical and Critical/Cultural Intelligence Studies

Abstract While the role of intelligence is to reduce uncertainty for decision-makers, a role of intelligence scholarship is to highlight uncertainty, that is, open up possibilities for ethical reflection and deliberation that conventional wisdom, institutional inertia, and mainstream research have closed off. Along these lines, this essay argues for the development and use of rhetorical and critical/cultural perspectives within the field of Intelligence Studies. It describes what rhetorical and critical/cultural research entails and explains how associated perspectives benefit the field.

The DNI's Open Source Center: An Organizational Communication Perspective

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD Commission) ceased operations on 27 May 2005, yet its influence reverberates throughout the U.S. Intelligence Community. One of the WMD Commission’s high-profile recommendations was to establish an Open Source Center (OSC) within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ensure that the Intelligence Community maximizes the use of publicly available, foreign print, radio, television, and Internet news and information. Acting on the WMD Commission’s recommendation, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) established the OSC within the CIA on 8 November 2005. Establishment of the OSC indicates that intelligence agencies have struggled to manage public, i.e., ‘‘open source,’’ information available to support their missions due to worldwide increases in media content and diffusion of communication technologies. Authorizing legislation for 2006 for the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contained explicit references to the problems of managing open source information. The accompanying

Milling and Public Warnings

Given the potential of modern warning technology to save lives, discovering whether it is possible to craft mobile alerts for imminent events in a way that reduces people’s tendency to seek and confirm information before initiating protective action is essential. The purpose of this study was to examine the possibility of designing messages for mobile devices, such as Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages, to minimize action delay. The impact of messages with varied amounts of information on respondents’ understanding, believing, personalizing, deciding, and intended milling was used to test Emergent Norm Theory, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Relative to shorter messages, longer public warning messages reduced people’s inclination to search for and confirm information, thereby shortening warning response delay. The Emergent Norm Theory used herein is broader in application than the context-specific models provided by leading warning scholars to date and yields deeper understanding about how people respond to warnings.

Organizational Rhetoric, Materiality, and the Shape of Organizational Democracy

The concept of organizational democracy continues to interest U.S. and international government officials, business executives, commentators, and scholars. This essay analyzes the rhetoric of the WorldBlu consultancys international campaign for “freedom at work” in the interest of advancing scholarship related to both organizational democracy and the materiality of organizational communication. Specifically, using the case of WorldBlu, the analysis pinpoints how capitalisms “real abstractions” shape conceptualizations of organizational democracy that underwrite pseudo-democratic forms of workplace organization.

A genosonic analysis of ISIL and US counter-extremism video messages

Analyses of extremist video messages typically focus on their discursive content. Using the case of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), this study instead draws upon the emerging subfield of genosonic analysis to understand the allure of extremist videos, as well as the ineffectiveness of US video messages designed to ‘counter violent extremism’ (CVE). Through a genosonic analysis of three high-profile ISIL videos and five popular US State Department CVE videos, the study advances two concepts – sonorous communality and sonic unmaking – to help explain ISIL’s appeal. The lack of equivalent dimensions in US CVE videos renders them sonically sterile in comparison to those of ISIL. The implications of this analysis for scholarship and practice conducted at the intersection of media, war and conflict are discussed.

A fearful engine of power: conceptualizing the communication–security relationship

ABSTRACT This essay isolates and explores a growing body of communication research concerned with ‘security.’ It opens by defining this concept, and discussing recent geopolitical and interdisciplinary trends contributing to its association with communication. It subsequently reviews distinctive engagement with ‘security’ displayed in five disciplinary subfields, including strategic communication, discourse analysis, public argument studies, rhetoric, and critical-cultural communication studies. It concludes by providing four sets of recommendations for future development of this research program.

On the aesthetic production of atmospheres: the rhetorical workings of biopower at The CELL

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Foucaults notion of biopower and Böhmes theory of atmospheres, we analyze The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (The CELL), a nonprofit institution in Denver, Colorado dedicated to preventing terrorism. Specifically, we argue that The CELL rhetorically induces visitors to submit to and actively participate in continuous surveillance by subjecting them to a strategic succession of atmospheres that affectively and emotively enlists their bodies in its cause. This largely material rhetoric utilizes the design aesthetics of controlled movement, simulation, interactivity, and pseudodialogue. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for rhetorical and security studies.