Citizen-led digital infrastructures as an alternative to political ineffectiveness: the 2017 Mexico City earthquake

• In Event: Science and Activism: STS and the Environment

Abstract

On 19 September 2017 morning, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit Southern Mexico, which caused 396 deaths, 40 collapsed buildings, massive damage to water, electricity, health and education infrastructure, and over 250 thousand displaced homeless individuals. In Mexico City alone, almost 3,500 homes had to be unoccupied due to massive structural damage. Immediately after the event and due to the city’s previous experiences with deadly earthquakes in the near past, citizen rescue bridges and aid collection cells began to self-organize, helped by barebones security support from the military and international assistance. However, general government support – both federal and local – was and continues to be insufficient when not counterproductive to citizen interests, leading to the emergence of alternative infrastructures and the use of social media to sidestep political ineffectiveness: as increasingly seen in international disaster events and political turmoil occasions, Twitter, Facebook and mobile apps supplanted traditional forms of communication infrastructures. Online platforms like @verificado19s became the go-to channel for both accessing and crowdsourcing trustworthy information on earthquake damage. In this talk, we will present the development of Tubarrioterespalda.org, a citizen+science led platform for coordinating direct contact between earthquake victims and anonymous relief donors, initiated by an interdisciplinary team of academics and activists. The talk will center on the intervention of STS and Sci-comm researchers in the platform development team, as it faced the challenge of implementing and planning the platform, where three issues were of paramount importance: the framing and development of citizen trust in the current setting of mistrust pervading traditional Mexican institutions; the socio-technical challenges of building an effective and anonymous communications infrastructure; and the development of ‘horizontal’ digital platforms as a response to ineffective hierarchical organizations in the Mexican context.

Authors

• Luis Ignacio Reyes-Galindo, State University of Campinas - UNICAMP

• Aline Guevara Villegas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

• Isabel Flores López, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

• Jorge Sosa, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)