A much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren't even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an "emergency." In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of "emergency" as an opposite of "normal." Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Elizabeth Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media. By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this. The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of "emergency," and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.
Elizabeth Ellcessor is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Miller Center. She is the author of Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation and co-editor of Disability Media Studies.
In this moment, in which everything and nothing are simultaneously defined using the language of emergency, Elizabeth Ellcessor's book is resonant, brilliant, timely, and compassionate, and helps to chart a way forward. Her analysis of emergency media and how they express specific articulations of technology, culture, and power as well as their connection to existing forms of white supremacy, disability justice, and misogyny are rigorous, and explain how our understandings of emergencies and the media with which we communicate that information have life and death stakes. * Shoshana Magnet, author of When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity * Sirens blare. Maps blaze in alarming colors. Phones buzz stridently as pop-up alerts invade the screen. Media technologies index the presence of an emergency, putting us on alert, entreating us to leap into protective action. Yet as Elizabeth Ellcessor argues cogently in her timely, alarming, and ultimately reparative book, emergency media and the workers operating them also have the power to construct emergency-to cultivate panic, to amplify risk, to signal when we've tipped over into some unacceptably harmful, destructive, or costly deviation from the norm. Emergency media inform how 'normality' is defined, and whose norms become the standard. It thus has the capacity, as Ellcessor shows us, to cultivate a new norm that's more inclusive, just, and compassionate. * Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media *
