Thank you so much, Ingrid!

I will definitely check these out 🙂

Yes, that’s true. And another sad thing is that people always blame government instead of reflecting themselves.

Thank you, Enkhzaya! You make such an important point that is true internationally: rural populations are too often forgotten and neglected.

Thanks, Yuxuan! It really is difficult not to feel regretful and despondent about the global COVID-19 response: if the whole world had locked down for a few weeks when the pandemic was declared in early 2020, it would all be long over by now, and so many fewer lives and livelihoods would have been lost …

Thanks, Nguyen! You make such an important point: once the worst of a disaster is over, people loose interest and move on to the next interesting thing, instead of working towards long-term sustainable solutions.

Thanks, Jeff! Communication technologies are certainly part of the solution. But they are also part of the problem: adding oil to the fire of a crisis through misinformation is more profitable than dousing the flames …

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/25/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-calls-for-urgent-external-regulation

Thanks, Ness! And here are some references for my response 🙂

Galeano, E. (1971). Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Mexico: Siglo XXI.
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. Camberwell, Vic: Penguin.
Reinert, E. S. (2008). How rich countries got rich … and why poor countries stay poor. London: Constable.

Thank you, Ness, for this detailed discussion of crisis communication in Colombia. Latin America has had such a raw deal for the past 500 years and internal elites in collusion with North American and European governments and corporations seem hellbent on extinguishing each flame of hope …

In my opinion, Covid showed us the bad and good sides of many of our political leaders and how the world has become increasingly globalised and interconnected because of social digital media. Therefore, various crises came out to the light to show us the incompetence of many political leaders who should have been prepared to handle communications quickly and effectively in both good times and bad. On the other hand, it brought us together as a community to deal with this situation, and many governments for example Australia recognize the presence of different languages in most of its communications. Also, this pandemic gave us a big lesson about how important it is to communicate the right things at the right time makes a remarkable difference between a disaster and a comeback.

I totally agree with the other students’ opinion on the crisis, especially on the current COVID situation. For instance, in my country, part of the population is still in a nomadic lifestyle. Those people who live in isolated rural areas, always tend to be left out of important information and become the victim of any crisis. There are many reasons here, for example, literacy, technological affordance, living far from the community etc. It is very important that these people need to be informed, acknowledged and communicated through those essential information and government officials and agencies need to reach out to these people especially during crises.

In times like these during the COVID-19 pandemic, crisis communication has never been more important than now. One thing I have noticed in Australia is that there is communication done by official social media accounts from NSW Health as an example to spread information about how to keep safe, even in languages that I have never heard of like Karen language.
I saw one of your responses in the forum here saying that there are issues with social media and that it is a double-edged sword – I 110% agree with that. Whilst the world has opened up communication to the rest of the world, and we’ve never been more exposed to information – there is so much fake news happening and so many misleading reporting that happens. Within a few clicks, communication especially during a crisis can turn itself completely and the audience do not know who to trust.
Crisis communication has been a vital part of our lives, however even though this communication has never been so close to us, it has never divided people so much as well.