Short abstract:

This paper investigates the current infrastructural changes of the Swedish public warning system, focusing on how different actors imagine, shape, and respond to public emergency messages. It explores the challenges and potentials of designing an accountable crisis information infrastructure.

Long abstract:

The promises of an ever more connected world enabled through digital platforms and infrastructures, has created an environment that when a crisis occurs the public have come to rely on and expect swift, accurate and up-to-date information so that they can prepare themselves and get to safety if need be. For crises that are spatially and temporally bound, such as minor floods, forest fires or gas leaks, the public warning system is often quite intact. However, for complex, transnational crises, such as the pandemic, climate change and war, the spatial and temporal aspects are unknown creating a state of instability and insecurity. These crises inevitably lead to a transformation in the information infrastructure where elements of uncertainty, vulnerability and mistrust become more apparent.

The changing power dynamics during a crisis can create value clashes and tensions between top-down strategies by government officials and the public whose everyday practices are to various degrees affected and fractured. In this paper, I study the changing infrastructure of the public warning system and how the infrastructure is enacted through different public emergency messages. I argue that an accountable and participatory governance of crisis information can be challenging to uphold due to social, political, and material boundaries within and alongside the public warning system. Unfamiliar and complex crises create uncertainties in how and when to use the established system and a lack of testing can create frustration and mistrust with the public.