A Model Study Of Crisis Information Transmitting Based On Small World Networks

Because of the over consuming of the natural sources and more and more acute contradiction in the social environment, all kinds of crises happen more and more frequent. Therefore crisis management has become a critical part of government work. As an important direction of crisis management, researches concerned about the rules of crisis information transmission have already made plenty of achievements, but further studies are still needed. First, most of studies are based on static situation, such as study about the pattern of crisis information transmission based on communication theories, case study and reflections after crisis, and there are few studies of the dynamic part. Second, when study the diffusion mechanism of information in a complex network, people always focus on the rumors but not the real situation that rumors and truths both exist, and they ignore that crises have different stages. Hence, by the help of small world networks, the present study analyzed the dynamic mechanisms of information transmission during the crisis, tried to find the key factors that could affect the information transmission and offered corresponding strategies to build a feedback regulation system.First, based on the'Life circle of crisis'theory proposed by Fink, the present study analyzed the different characteristics of crisis information transmission on four stages of crisis, used the SIS and SIR model which come from classic propagation theory of disease in a complex network to explain the dynamics of information during the breakout stage and chronic stage of crisis, and used several Mean field equations to descript the dynamic changes of individuals in the network. Second, a Matlab program simulating social network was build based on small world theory after the description of how people transmitting crisis information form a network, and the rules of information transmission and the parameters were defined. The outputs of this program were mean rumor level, mean truth level and the proportion of panic individuals. The results confirm previous analysis about the four stages of crisis information transmission. By adjusting the parameters, the transmission pattern could be change, and the quantitative analysis shows that government control is very important for the health of crisis information transmission. Controlling of the information diffusion and managing of communication media by the government, and raising the capacity of facing crisis of the public is beneficial to eliminate rumors and to stabilize the society during crisis. At last, some advices about crisis management were given to the government. To fulfill the public requirement, the government should release information in time, let the information cover bigger range, release different kinds of information corresponding to different crisis stages and monitor the nonmainstream medias and internet web. On the other hand, social learning mechanism should be established to fundamentally evaluate the capacity of the public when facing the crisis. Seven parts were illustrated, including theoretical support, basic connotations, key elements, working mechanism, running model, developing stages and building method. One case study about Wenchuan earth quake was analyzed to show how this learning mechanism work, which demonstrated that building of this mechanism is feasible and essential.