Visual Crisis Communication. A Social Semiotic Approach to Visual Dialogues on Social Media

While social media enhance diverse aspects of crisis information sharing and engagement, its distinctiveness lies in the wide range of visuals that can be shared and linked to text-based messages. This chapter addresses visual crisis communication and proposes a novel methodology to delve into the usage of visuals during crises in social media contexts. Given the rather unbalanced methodological landscape that favors quantitative methodologies and content analyses, we propose a qualitative, social-semiotic approach that helps reveal the specificity of social media visuals and their dynamic interplay with other images and/or the text-based messages. This also facilitates the identification of stakeholders’ coping strategies that are visually manifested. Such an approach is empirically applied to the 2019–2020 Australian bushfire crisis and its visual coverage on Facebook by the national news service 9news Australia and its followers. The proposed perspective and its application show how co-creation of meaning during crises in social media contexts can be systematically investigated and interpreted when visual communication is in focus.