Collective Informational Capacity of the Civil Society Shaping Societal Resilience

Crises are experienced locally in people’s own spatial and virtual social milieus. In each local context, the informational conditions for both short-term and long-term action are shaped by public and private sectors, but the use of social, physical, and digital infrastructure affecting information flows is essentially in the hands of the civil society, too. Using empirical findings from our case studies of community resilience in COVID-19 crisis in Helsinki, Finland, we discuss the significance of use of social media as a dispersed, yet collective informational capacity as part of emergency preparedness and operations. We argue that communicational agencies of people and communities and the resulting collective informational capacity, especially in the local settings, should be adopted and rooted to the concept of resilience, as well as to emergency preparedness and risk management of society. To be resilient in the face of sudden and long-term crises, societies need the capacity to deal with various problems related to information. In an emergency, there is a need for quick sharing and correction of information. In the long run, the resilience of a society is bound up with informational conditions for collective change-making and adaptation to long-term system-level crises such as climate change.