Discussions

Based on the findings drawn from the interview data, aside from using multiple platforms (e.g., mainstream media, social media) to acquire crisis information, Indonesian dual screeners also engaged in online discussions via mobile instant messengers or open social media platforms with their close ties (e.g., family members, friends, colleagues) and weak ties (e.g., like-minded people). The online conversations shaped the initial crisis information that the participants had previously acquired and provoked them to respond to the terrorist attacks through various forms, for example sharing crisis information, offering help, praying, or giving emotional support to the victims and other affected individuals, and so on. These findings are in line with the concept of CMM (Shah et al., 2017) which suggests that media consumption mediated by communicative behaviors (online and offline) can influence someone’s participation. The findings also denote that dual screening helps individuals respond to crisis situations more efficiently, particularly terrorist attacks, by facilitating information-related and communication-related activities simultaneously.

With regard to crisis response on Twitter, the daily distribution of tweets indicates that participants cannot maintain their engagement for a long period of time and therefore

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 conversations about terrorist attacks cease quickly. The interview data also sustains this finding as most participants mentioned that they were only concerned about the incident for two to seven days. This is congruent with existing studies of social media activism in Indonesia (Lim, 2013), suggesting that although an issue might emerge quickly, it does not take a long time for Indonesians to lose their interest in the topic, allowing the issue to dissipate. The excessive amount of contents circulated on social media, short attention spans, and disperse conversations contribute to the discontinuance of discussion (Lim, 2013).

The results of Twitter analysis also assert action-related content as the most dominant response of Indonesians during the terrorist attacks. The public would like to collectively solve problems emerged in the society using online platforms. The data from the interviews also affirms the findings as half of the digital participants in this study used online platforms to encourage other people to do something as a response to terrorist attacks and to achieve a social change. These findings support the previous study which argues that the advent of social media can positively contribute to society and citizens’ participation (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2012). This could happen because social media have the ability to mobilize people and to attract public attention in a short period of time (Tufekci, 2014). Nonetheless, there are still many skeptical views with regard to social media use and its relation to participation. Concepts like slacktivism (lazy activism) and clicktivism (click activism) challenge the worthiness and effectiveness of digital activism because

people perceive this kind of activism as something superficial since the participants actually do nothing and social media cannot mobilize participants to the offline activity (Gladwell, 2010;

Morozov, 2009).

Apart from action-related contents, the tweets also contain a relatively significant amount of emotional messages. One of contents is emotional ventilation which indicates that online

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 platforms can facilitate emotional coping on the aftermath of crisis situations (Takahashi et al., 2015). Some other themes under this content are related to social support, such as offering prayers, expressing sympathy, and moral support. Many studies have previously found that individuals will be more likely to mourn over celebrities’ death because of their popularity (Courbet & Fourquet-Courbet, 2014). However, there are still some conditions which influence someone to extend their support to non-celebrities’ death, for instance fallen victims of terrorist attacks, as it is seen as ritualistic behaviors (Bautista & Lin, 2015).

The findings of content analysis also accentuate the importance of the authorities during crisis situations. Many government institutions or security forces possess a high engagement rate, even higher than celebrities. During the interview, many participants also mentioned that they seek information from the authorities, such as the Indonesian National Police. In many occasions, celebrities are the one that can draw public’s attention using their persona (Tufekci, 2014).

However, in the context of a crisis, the authorities play an important role and hold more power to attract the public. One possible reason that might affect this behavior is because Indonesians have developed positive sentiment and trust toward government. Based on the survey report by Gallup World Poll in 2016, Indonesia has the highest rank with regard to trust and confidence in the government (Kuwado, 2017). Citizens believe that the government has been very responsive and can provide reliable protection and services to the society (Sari, 2017).

This study also delves into the different stages of crisis response process (i.e., observation, interpretation, choice, and dissemination) in response to terrorist attacks. The first stage of this process is observation when the individuals start to gather the information regarding terrorist attacks. It should be noted that most of participants in this study first learn about the news from interpersonal interaction on social media, particularly WhatsApp and Twitter. After getting the

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 initial information, they looked for further information on the media they are convenient with, sustaining the findings of investigation conducted by Austin et al. (2012) which suggest that when individuals are exposed to an information from a third party, they will be more likely to look for information on other news sources. This will be different if the initial information is obtained from an organization as the people will be less likely to look for additional information.

This research also analyzes connectivity as underlying activity in each stages of the crisis response process. In every phase of the process, it appears that there is always a need to connect to other people for various purposes via social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) or mobile instant messengers (e.g., Whatsapp, Line). During the observation, participants look for information regarding the terrorist attacks from their family members, friends, colleagues and any other parties or just to check in their condition. On the interpretation phase, participants discuss about the incident with other people in order to get clearer picture or the contact the other to validate the information they have acquired. The following phase is choice.

The connectivity is demonstrated by the journalists when they get in touch with their editors to discuss about what they should do. Lastly, there is a need to connect to the others in order to disseminate the information that the participants have obtained on the previous stages.

The interview data suggests different media behaviors among three groups (incident-related actors, digital participants, and journalists). The incident-(incident-related actors and journalists mostly utilized mobile instant messengers to communicate to their close ties (e.g., family members, friends, and colleagues) and limited their activities on open social media platforms, while the digital participants also used social media, such as Twitter, enabling them to establish relationships with weak ties. Interestingly, the three public groups investigated in this study sought crisis information from different main sources (TV and online news portal for incident-related actors,

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 TV and social media for digital participants, and WhatsApp group (news professionals) as well as TV for journalists). Another notable finding is the information sharing behavior during terrorist attacks: digital participants were more likely to share the crisis information they had, compared to the incident-related actors and journalists. The rising popularity of citizen journalism using user-generated content platforms like Twitter might encourage ordinary people to share the information they have on crisis situations (Farinosi & Treré, 2014). Furthermore, Indonesian social media users, especially Twitter participants, are also known to be very active in passing crisis information on online platforms (Chatfield et al., 2013).

The outcomes of the Twitter content analysis and in-depth interview also complement each other with regard to individuals’ motivations to use dual screening under a crisis situation. During the interview, one of the social drivers to utilize dual screening during terrorist attacks is to attain social change which is reflected in the action-related content and interestingly only occurs mostly within digital participants. Moreover, the interviewees often consider Twitter as an information source and a channel to spread the information. Investigation of the tweets proves that a lot of information can be acquired from this platform as many media organizations or individuals share and post tweets containing information about terrorist attacks. Additionally, as mentioned in the interview, individuals need to express the negative feelings induced by terrorist attacks to calm themselves and to convey or even receive emotional support which can be facilitated by dual screening practice. These behaviors are also reflected on the tweets that contain emotional messages as a part of the mechanism to cope with the terrorist attacks.

The results of motivations to use dual screening also support past studies of dual screening (Chadwick et al., 2017; Lin & Chiang, 2017) suggesting the influence of social dimensions (i.e., social presence, social capital, sociability) on individuals to engage in dual screening behavior.

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 During the interview, many participants, especially among incident related actors and journalists, admitted that they felt the sense of other people’s presence by watching videos on one screen and having interactions related to the videos on the other screen. This encourages them to engage in dual screening which is also found on previous literature (Han & Lee, 2014). This feeling helps the participants in this study to cope with the plight of post terrorist attack as they feel like being accompanied by the others (Yates & Partridge, 2015), besides it also enhances the excitement of watching the videos. Moreover, past studies of dual screening in political communication also discover bridging social capital as one motivator to use dual screening for political purposes (Lin

& Chiang, 2017). However, in the context of terrorist attacks, this only appears prevalent for digital participants, but not for incident-related actors and journalists. Although some participants from these two groups are still motivated by bridging social capital, they develop more bonding social capital. One possible explanation is individuals belonging to incident-related actors and journalist groups communicate more intensely with their close ties during terrorist attacks, while digital participants engage in interactions with weak ties.

Results of in-depth interviews also show that cognitive aspects, particularly information seeking, information appraisal, and information sharing, are drivers to use dual screening which are consistent with the findings of an earlier investigation by Gil de Zuniga et al. (2015). During crisis situations, such as terrorist attacks, in order to know more about the incident, individuals use multiple platforms to look for information (Austin et al., 2012). TV still becomes primary information source, especially under a crisis situation. Although the viewership of traditional TV in many parts of the world keeps declining over the years (Business Insider Intelligence, 2017), TV still has the highest penetration (96%) in Indonesia, compared to the other platforms, such as internet (44%), radio (37%), and newspaper (7%) (Media Indonesia, 2017). In addition,

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 Indonesians put a lot of trust in TV to obtain crisis information, even more than their own family members or friends and other media platforms (Abud, 2013).

It is important to note that the context of terrorist attacks provides some more insights regarding the motivation to use dual screening. Emotional aspects, such as emotional venting and emotional support, are still not well-explored in the literature of dual screening and this study finds these emotional dimensions play moderately significant roles in encouraging individuals to utilize dual screening during a crisis situation. Crises like terrorist attacks can affect someone’s emotion and evoke certain feelings, like sadness and fear (Small et al., 2006). Dual screening is found to be able to facilitate the emotional coping by providing platforms to vent the emotions and convey emotional support.

There are also some different motivations to use dual screening among the three groups recruited in this study (incident-related actors, digital participants, and journalists). As has been previously mentioned, incident-related actors and journalists wanted to maintain their established network with their close ties, referring to bonding social capital, while the digital participants tended to bridge social capital with weak-ties like netizens who cared about the same terrorist attacks. Moreover, incident-related actors and journalists perceived social presence from their close ties, while the digital participants wanted to experience the sense of companionship of weak ties. Digital participants also used dual screening to promote social change, a motivation which did not really appear prevalent in the other two groups. Furthermore, the incident-related actors and journalists used multiple mainstream media to look for crisis information, such as TV and online news portal, while the digital participants also sought information through social media, particularly Twitter. The incident-related actors and journalists shared their negative emotions engendered by watching breaking news or live reports through mobile instant messengers to their

DOI:10.6814/THE.NCCU.IMICS.006.2018.F05 close ties, such as family members, friends, and colleagues. The incident-related actors refrained from venting on an open social media platform as they did not want to make people feel more worried about them. As for the journalists, they attempted to maintain their professionalism in objective news reporting. In contrast, the digital participants were more outspoken in conveying personal negative emotions on open social media platforms as they believe, by doing that, they can share their burden with their social media friends.