Informating Crisis: Expanding Critical Perspectives in Crisis Informatics

Over the past 20 years, the practices of crisis preparedness, response, and recovery have become increasingly dependent on information and communication technology (ICT) to accomplish their work. More recently, crisis informatics has developed an analysis of these phenomena from social and computational perspectives. To further to assess the consequences and opportunities of technological developments in the field, we re-introduce the concept of informating, first developed by Zuboff to describe the impacts of technological changes on the workplace during the 1980s. We draw on four contemporary examples of how ICT is changing the way we conceive of and respond to natural hazards to offer a new reading of the concept of informating in the growing field of crisis informatics. We then argue that this concept suggests the adoption of a more critical agenda for crisis informatics research to better respond to contemporary challenges presented by climate change and natural hazards.