Résumé
Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, social networks have been seen as a potential source of information during a major crisis. Citizens of New York City used the social network Twitter to report on the situation in real time. By using their smartphones, citizens become a citizen-sensor. They provide geographic information from the field that can be used in crisis management with near-instantaneousness, faster than first responders. It has been about ten years since Western European crisis management systems started using digital social networks in their communication with citizens. Yet, in France, the Paris attack came as a shock as there was no protocol for using social networks in a crisis situation at the time and the population was left in a two hours communication black out. A few months later, during the Brussels attacks of March 22, 2016, the Belgian crisis managers also left the population for an hour without guidelines.Since these events, the digital response is strong in France with the development of several successive national crisis management applications (SAIP, TousAntiCovid), several web portals and the multiplication of institutional accounts on social networks. However, if there is a growing objective of using social networks, States are struggling to regulate the activities of GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) within their own territories. At the same time, there are no studies or indicators that report on the concrete contributions of the use of digital social networks during a crisis.What information can be accessed and used on digital social networks during a crisis? What are the contributions of digital technology in the transformation of risk communication and in the involvement of citizens in crisis management? What are the expectations of crisis managers regarding digital technology? What does crisis management reveal about the interactions between information flows and territory? This thesis focuses on the use of digital social networks in the context of territorialized crisis management and on a territorial comparison between the Ile-de-France region in France and the Brussels-Capital region in Belgium. The objective of this research work is to study the logics of geographical information circulation between territories and digital social networks during a crisis as well as to observe the effects of the organization of crisis management systems on this information circulation.To answer the questions raised, this thesis is structured around four axes of work. The first axis consists in the constitution of a theoretical framework, the territory 2.0, to structure the information exchanges between territories and digital social networks. The second axis mobilizes interviews with several French and Belgian crisis managers in order to understand how the different crisis management systems are organized. Moreover, we tried to identify the perception, the position and the expectations of these managers towards digital technology. The third axis consists of an empirical approach on the analysis of 11 crisis situations on the social network Twitter that took place between 2009 and 2019. To do so, we defined, extracted and analyzed 11 corpora of tweets corresponding to the temporality and the keywords of these 11 crisis situations. Finally, the last axis corresponds to an empirical approach on the perception of risks and citizen participation in crisis management by digital means using a questionnaire distributed in the Ile-de-France and Brussels-Capital regions.
Source: http://www.theses.fr/2021CYUN1070
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