2017, Natural Disasters, and the Future of Communication

Notwithstanding false missile attack alerts, there have been plenty of real emergencies to face of late. Southern California has kicked off 2018 with catastrophic mudslides resulting from the largest wildfire in state history, while Northern California is still recovering from its own inferno. The fourth-quarter firestorms capped months of mind-bending disaster in 2017: massive flooding across South Asia, huge earthquakes across Mexico, devastating hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in the Caribbean.

The emergency response surrounding these historic crises underscores something remarkable about modern life. Our technology has advanced so rapidly that it is has vastly expanded — and deeply fractured — the way we exchange information. As a Miami evacuee of Hurricane Irma, I had my own communication challenges.

That Was Fast

It used to take decades for a new communications technology to take hold. A full 38 years passed between the construction of the first telephone line in the U.S. and the first transcontinental telephone connection. It would be another 12 years before the first transatlantic call could be made.

Fast-forward to this century and recall that Twitter didn’t even exist when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Yet last November, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said that social media tools like Twitter, Nextdoor, and Facebook played a “huge role” in his department’s response to Hurricane Harvey, serving as a de facto 9-1-1 system that “certainly” saved lives during the storm.

Social media isn’t the only communication upstart.

In early December, the cellphones of about eight million people across seven Southern California counties simultaneously pinged and buzzed with wireless emergency alerts warning of extreme fire danger. The state had just deployed push notifications as community sirens in what was described as an “unprecedented” move by California’s deputy director of the Office of Emergency Services.

In the past, emergency alerts went out through television and radio broadcasts. But with satellite and streaming and mobile technologies, we’re no longer watching or listening collectively to the same channels at the same time in the same places, and may not even have a television set. Many areas already have systems that can ring every landline telephone in a set region with a recorded emergency message — but landline use is declining.

So, we now see Social Media as 9-1-1. Smartphones as sirens. The rapid rise of new digital communication technologies has morphed disaster warning and emergency response norms. This fragmentation isn’t limited to emergency communications — they just provide powerful context for how different things are now and how quickly it has happened.

Everything, All the Time

There is cultural shift in the way all communication takes place. We didn’t just move from landlines to mobile in the blink of an eye. We’ve moved to everything, everywhere, all the time — hardwired or wireless, real-time or asynchronous, automated or live, voice or text, social media, chatbots, virtual assistants, email, websites, apps, SMS, MMS, podcasts, video, TV, radio, print. There is no dominant means of exchange. We now live in a state of accelerated communications flux.

We have more choices and we have more complexity. Captain Steve Kaufmann of the Ventura County Fire Department said that emergency alerting is now multifaceted: “… if we rely on one system, that fails … People aren't registered for some alerts. Cell towers go down. We used every single thing possible to get the word out so that every person who could be affected would hopefully get a warning in some way.”

The same is true in business. The South Carolina Federal Credit Union described preparation for Hurricane Irma-related service interruptions, power outages, and delays in delivery of cash for ATMs and financial centers. “Anything that involves processes or involves power can be interrupted … We’re active on Facebook and Twitter, we have an alert option on our website, we had this text-message capability, and we also had an email option. We decided we would just pull out all the stops in terms of member communication.” They used all their “channels” to up the odds of reaching all their members.

In South Florida, my own experience during Hurricane Irma revealed that the systems for disseminating public information have not kept pace with shifting technologies. More importantly, they ignore recent citizen preferences for cord-cutting. Without traditional TV, cable, or radio at home, my family found the most compelling emergency warning to be the one physically posted to our front door by our local homeowner’s association, in addition to an outbound interactive SMS message from my employer to Florida employees. Even determining flood evacuation zones was challenging, as the Miami-Dade website uses outdated flash technology that doesn’t load on mobile.

What’s the New Normal?

Using business communication as a gauge, research indicates that requests for customer support through consumer messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through social media by 2019. Artificial intelligence (AI) is also adding to the mix. Technology predictions published in mid-2017 estimate that by 2019, 20% of user interactions with the smartphone will be via virtual personal assistants (VPAs). By 2020, AI will disrupt the jobs of 1,000,000 phone-based customer support agents. By 2022, companies will be onboarding up to 12 immature customer interaction channels for CRM (customer relationship management) — co-browsing, augmented reality, holograms, and more.

That’s a lot of change in a short period of time. And the trouble is that these communication changes don’t emerge and proliferate uniformly across whole populations. It can take a long time and a lot of effort to get everything working together reliably. People assume that because a technology exists, it automatically means it’s enabled. It doesn’t.

For example, while millions of Californians were able to receive an emergency smartphone alert during recent firestorms, they had to make a conscious decision to sign up for that service. The ability for an individual to “call 9-1-1 if you can; text if you can’t” was only introduced throughout Los Angeles County on December 1, and still isn’t anywhere near available nationwide, even though texting has been around for nearly a quarter-century! It isn’t even available widely in Silicon Valley, surely the leader in adopting new communications technologies.

And when such technologies are enabled, challenges remain — as anyone in the state of Hawaii can tell you, after the false alarm during MLK Weekend. Poor user interfaces, planning failures, and human fallibility still inhibit our ability to trust new means of notification. Even when alerts were pushed out in Hawaii and in Ventura County, the timing was not uniform across telecommunications carriers so that some people didn’t receive any notification or didn’t believe the message when it finally arrived.

The Road Ahead

The White House has promised to kick off 2018 with a massive infrastructure spending program. But in the 21st Century, infrastructure includes more than roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways. The Information Superhighway needs reinvestment as well as our crumbling network of interstate freeways. How will Congress address this need?

Our greatest challenge in the evolution of communications is not in inventing the next iPhone or Twitter. It lies with interconnecting everything we already have, making sure that systems can easily scale for growth, and integrating what emerges next as seamlessly as possible. Innovation has not — and will not — shield us from every peril or completely take over responsibilities handled by human beings. But it should at least make it easier to actually help us — in fair weather or foul — communicate.

Christopher Connolly is the vice president of solution strategy for Genesys. He is thankful to have survived Hurricane Irma in Miami and can be reached at [email protected] or @ConnotronNY.