ABSTRACT
On July 22, 2011, at 15:26, a radical right-wing Islamophobe, Anders Behring Breivik, detonated a bomb in the city center of Oslo, Norway, and then killed 69 people and wounded 60 others before the police were able to arrest him on the island of Utøya. This chapter analyzes anonymized mobile phone traffic data in Oslo and around Norway to understand Norwegian mobile phone communication behaviors and see if and how people activated their social networks during this tragedy. We examine the sequencing of calls within individual users’ own strong-tie networks, as well as the geographical diffusion of calls within this network. In addition, interview data are used to further illuminate the quantitative data. Following Bruns et al. (2012), mobile phones are one of several new communication media used in today’s emergency situations that supplement traditional face-to-face, mass media, and landline phone communication. Thus, studies such as this, as well as studies of new media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, Instagram, and Flicker), are building a new literature in crisis informatics (Palen et al. 2010).
