What is a Disaster? Or, Why It is
a Bad Idea to Yell “Fire!” in a
Movie Theatre
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AlH2oYe
dfk The Smiths, Panic
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84qWb8i_
Q_A Kaiser Chiefs, I Predict a Riot
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9igM1d
H_NY Foxboro Hot Tubs, Stop Drop and Roll
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okYw0wl9
ymc Wakey! Wakey! 1876, The Brooklyn
Theatre Fire
Coming to Terms:
• Definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:
• “ Disaster: Anything that befalls of ruinous or
distressing nature; a sudden or great
misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a
calamity.”
• Etymology: something happening under a bad
star.
What constitutes a disaster may be difficult to
define, but examples can help us to think about
what characterizes them:
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Spatially
Temporally
In terms of who is affected by them and how
In terms of how people respond to them (their
effect on subjects)
– Individually
– Collectively
– Over time
• What disasters does Joanna Bourke write
about in the chapter we read of her 2005
book Fear: A Cultural History?
The Iroquois Theatre Fire,
1903
Great Chicago Fire, 1871
Taking place over two full days and killing
hundreds of people, the Great Fire burned over
10 square kilometres of the city of Chicago.
The Tay Bridge Disaster, 1879
“It was sad when the great ship went
down...” The Titanic Sinking,1912
The Halifax Explosion, 1917
2000 killed, 9000 injured
• How does Bourke define “disaster”?
• When Bourke writes that disasters force
individuals and communities to face a
corporeal, material, and moral threat (p. 52),
what does she mean?
The natural vs. the human-made
The Earthquake in Haiti, 2010:
320,000 people dead, 1 million
homeless.
The Hindenburg Disaster,
1937
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2
YY0xw5r1ro&feature=fvsr
The Sudden ....
The Boston Molasses Explosion,
1919
The Hillsborough
Football Disaster,
1989. 96 people
died.
The Chronic
The Fukushima Meltdown in Japan,
2011, and the Bhopal Disaster of 1984
stand as examples of chronic or longterm disasters.
Affecting the few vs. affecting many
The crash of US Airways Flight
1549 (Captain Sullenberger) in
the Hudson River in 2009 nd the
Financial Meltdown, coming to
an economy near you since
2008.
Economies of Blame
Who or what is seen to be responsible for the
disaster?
How does the decision about who or what is to
blame influence the meaning that the disaster
will be given?
For some time, disasters have been thought to have
a didactic function. What does this mean?
• Bourke cites a number of different ways that
the causes of and responses to disasters have
been studied. What are they? What links each
of them together?
The Social Psychology of the Disaster
• Gustav Le Bon
• The Crowd (1895)
• Urbanization led to dramatic
changes in the ways that
people live
• These changes meant that
humans were confronted by a
new social influence, that of
the crowd
• The crowd can and does
influence the responses that
people will have to real and
perceived threats
• The crowd may also be
influenced by external forces
Stereotyping Panic
• Bourke outlines a number of
studies that suggest that
particular types of people will
be more susceptible to panic
than others. By the standards of
today, the central assumptions
of these studies would be
roundly criticized. They assumed
that panic was more likely to
occur in certain groups of
people. Which people? What
stereotypes did these
assumptions rely on?
Technologies Responding to the
Disaster
• Architecture
• Law and regulation –
eg. Tort Law, Building
Codes
• Insurance
• Education
• Media
• Others?
Case Study: The War of the Worlds
Broadcast (1939)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl_J4J2m
QpQ
Hadley Cantril’s Study of the Panic
Broadcast
• Princeton Radio Research Project funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation
• Study on WotW Broadcast called The Invasion
from Mars, A Study in the Psychology of Panic
(1940)
• Asked who panicked and why
• Surprising findings that a person’s suggestibility
was not based on class or gender or race, but was
a result of a variety of factors that are difficult to
capture empirically
Workshop: Writing with Concision
• "I believe more in the
scissors than I do in the
pencil," Truman Capote
once said. In other
words, what we cut out
of our writing is
sometimes more
important than what
we put in.
5 Strategies for Writing Concisely:
• 1) Use Active Verbs
• Whenever possible, make the subject of a
sentence do something.
• Wordy: The grant proposals were reviewed
by the students.
• Revised: The students reviewed the grant
proposals.
2) Don't Try to Show Off
• Don't presume that big words or lengthy
phrases will impress your readers: often the
simplest word is the best.
• Wordy: At this moment in time, students who
are matriculating through high school should
be empowered to participate in the voting
process.
• Revised: High school students should have the
right to vote.
3) Cut Empty Phrases
• Some of the most common phrases mean little, if
anything, and should be cut from our writing:
• all things considered, as a matter of fact, as far as I
am concerned , at the present time, in society, for the
most part, in my opinion, type of, it seems that, due to
the fact that
• Wordy: All things being equal, what I am trying to say is
that in my opinion all students should, in the final
analysis, have the right to vote for all intents and
purposes.
• Revised: Students should have the right to vote.
4) Avoid Using Noun Forms of Verbs
• This process is called "excessive
nominalization”
• Wordy: The presentation of the arguments by
the students was convincing.
• Revised: The students presented their
arguments convincingly. Or . . .
• The students argued convincingly.
5) Replace Vague Nouns
• Replace vague nouns (such as area, aspect, case,
factor, manner, situation, something, thing, type,
and way) with more specific words--or eliminate
them altogether.
• Wordy: After reading several things in the area of
psychology-type subjects, I decided to put myself
in a situation where I might change my major.
• Revised: After reading several psychology books, I
decided to change my major.
Other strategies from the Handbook:
1) Eliminate unnecessary words
-- does what you have written still make sense
when a word is eliminated? If so, it may not be
necessary.
2) Get rid of empty intensifiers – does what you
are saying need to be “very”, “extremely”
anything?
3) Reduce and shorten wordy phrases
4) Simplify complex sentences
5) Use positive constructions not not not
negative ones
6) Simplify your sentence structure... But be
careful. As Einstein once said, “Make things
simple, not simpler.”
The Right Word at the Right Time
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Avoid colloquialisms
Avoid slang
Avoid being redundant
Be sure you know what the word you are
using means
• Don’t let spell-check decide the word for you;
proof-read it yourself
• Avoid generalizations and stereotypes
Avoid Common Errors Such as
Mistaking...
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Your and You’re
Its and it’s
Their and they’re
Bear and bare
Cite, sight, and site
Coarse and course
Council and counsel
Complement and compliment
Hear and here
Which and witch
Whether and weather
Where and were
Accept and except
Affect and effect