Abstract
Tragically, students in the United States go to school every day with some understanding that they might experience a shooting that day. My technical capstone project investigates how the University of Virginia’s Emergency Management (EM) department communicates with students during these and other emergencies. To ultimately improve safety, our team conducted research to optimize emergency alerts, addressing gaps between EM’s goals and actual student responses. My sociotechnical research analyzes the impact of social media on the cultural trend of desensitization to gun violence. I focused on internet humor and constant connectivity, exploring how these factors weaken an individual’s emotional response to content regarding gun violence. The U.S. faces a challenge in both responding to violent situations and preventing them from happening in the first place. My capstone addresses EM responses to emergencies that occur, and my sociotechnical thesis focuses on prevention, identifying a potential root cause for the desensitization to gun violence and subsequent political inaction.
Having experienced a tragic shooting on campus as freshmen, my capstone team understood how vital this emergency alerting system is, and we sought to strengthen it further. Students typically scrutinize UVA Alerts during an active situation, but these concerns often fail to translate into actual change. The goal of our technical capstone, through student-centered data collection and statistical analysis, was to investigate pain points among undergraduates in order to improve trust and compliance with UVA Alerts. We conducted a focus group with eight students to guide the content of a larger, quantitative survey that was completed by over 500 students. Through this survey, we assessed students’ priorities regarding message traits, trust in UVA Alerts, and testing potential new features.
My capstone project ultimately found that students value clarity, expediency, and detail. Statistical tests showed that students overwhelmingly prefer certain message traits, such as capitalization of keywords, a logical order of information, and a timestamp element. We found that trust is severely harmed when students perceive a delay in alert delivery, and that students primarily seek outside resources like the anonymous posting platform YikYak to receive faster, more detailed information, even while understanding that this information may be inaccurate. Based on these findings and more, we compiled a set of conclusions for general emergency communications and a comprehensive set of recommendations specifically for UVA EM.
My related sociotechnical research question focuses on cultural attitudes toward gun violence in the U.S. and how social media technology might contribute to desensitization. As social media continues to pervade our daily lives, we must understand how this technology shapes how we think and perceive the world around us, especially when it pertains to life-or-death political issues. To investigate this topic, I conducted an interdisciplinary literature review to connect modern technology like mobile phones, the psychology of recommendation algorithms, emotional responses to internet memes, the process of desensitization, and potential political consequences.
Through this research, I found that existing evidence on the psychology of desensitization supports the idea that social media can have a desensitizing or normalizing effect on attitudes toward gun violence. Specifically, the literature shows that receiving upsetting content in a humorous context lessens the typical negative emotional response, and repeated exposure to this type of content also causes desensitization. Both are processes facilitated by social media. I also argue that this normalization decreases pressure on political figures to enact policy change, concluding that social media not only impacts the individual’s emotional reaction but also society’s overall response (or lack thereof) to the gun violence epidemic in the U.S.
