ABSTRACT
Resilience is a popular construct in the psychological and social sciences, because it emphasizes the human capacity to experience and recover from challenging events. This chapter focuses on community resilience specifically, which is typically understood to be a geographic community’s ability to recover following a challenge or difficulty. Community resilience can be applied to a variety of issues and events, but is most frequently applied to community disasters. Community disasters typically include events that are considered natural or human-caused. Human-caused disasters may be nonintentional or intentional. The chapter utilizes J. Brian Houston, M. L. Spialek, et al.’s communication and community resilience model to consider the role of social media as one specific communication system and resource. It reviews the opportunities for using one particular communication source for resilience efforts: social media. The chapter describes several ways that citizens, journalists, organizations, governmental agencies, and communities can potentially utilize social media to facilitate community resilience efforts.
