With Help from Afar: Cross-Local Communication in an Online COVID-19 Pandemic Community

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DOI

Crisis informatics research has examined geographically bounded crises, \revision{such as natural or man-made disasters}, identifying the critical role of local and hyper-local information focused on one geographic area in crisis communication. The COVID-19 pandemic \copyedit{represents} an understudied kind of crisis that simultaneously hits locales across the globe, engendering an emergent form of crisis communication, which we term \textit{cross-local communication}. Cross-local communication is the exchange of crisis information between geographically dispersed locales to facilitate local crisis response. To unpack this notion, we present a qualitative study of an online ethnic community of overseas Taiwanese who supported fellow Taiwanese from afar. We detail four distinctive types of cross-local communication: situational updates, risk communication, medical consultation, and coordination. We discuss how the current pandemic situation brings new understandings to crisis informatics \revision{and online health community} literature, and what role digital technologies could play in supporting cross-local communication.