The human population is, and has always been, quite diverse in abilities, skills and preferences. The growing recognition of that intrinsic diversity is often assumed to be a hallmark of social and cultural progress. But recognizing a challenge is not the same as meeting it. And the way we describe a challenge can either help or hinder our attempts to rise to it.
Those of us responsible for the generation and delivery of effective warnings to the public in times of emergency are called upon to address diversity in a number of dimensions, including sensory abilities, language constraints, housing and workplaces, population density, economic resources, education, and individual awareness and preparedness, just to name a few.
For most of the Twentieth Century “official warning” was largely synonymous with “mass media.” Radio and television were the communication tools of choice and largely defined public warning practices. This led to a largely unconscious homogenization of the perceived audience for official alerts. Attempts to counter this “one message fits all” tendency by means of regulation have had some limited success, but enforcement has often stalled in the face of anti-regulatory political sentiment.
The Internet, first in its wired form and more recently in growing synergy with cellular telephones and other wireless devices, seems to offer a more hopeful prospect for advocates of diversity. Since each message delivery is a separate transaction instead of a once-and-for-all broadcast, why can’t we send alerts tailored to each recipient’s individual needs and preferences?
Of course it isn’t quite that simple. Several issues need to be addressed. First, can the available connections actually be counted on to deliver tens of thousands or even millions of messages quickly (where “quickly” is roughly the same as “simultaneously”) and reliably? Second, how do we determine precisely who needs which version of the message without raising the spectres of privacy violations or even just random database error? And third, how do we actually create simultaneous versions of an alert, not only in visual, aural and tactile form, but also in a number of languages and deliverable over a variety of devices and networks?
And since none of these constraints seem likely to admit an absolute 100% solution, how do we know what’s “good enough”? And for that matter, who gets to say what’s good enough, for any individual, for a group, for the community as a whole?
All real questions. But does that mean we’re doomed to fail? I don’t think so.
THE ISSUER’S DILEMMA
Right now I’m responsible for all-hazard warnings for a county with about 1.2 million people. I have a small budget and a small staff, and I report to the elected Sheriff of the county and also to the elected Board of Supervisors. We’re all committed to providing equal access to life-saving alerts to everyone.
Of those 1.2 million people, I’m told that something on the order of three and a half percent may be deaf or hard of hearing. (I’m also told that all these statistics are subject to a fair degree of interpretation and variability, which is why I’m not trying to be particularly precise.) Something like seven percent may be visually impaired (and of course some of those two groups overlap.) Roughly ten percent of our school children are described by the state as having “limited English proficiency”; I’m guessing that number is actually higher in the older population. Of that “LEP” student base, a bit less than a third speak languages other than Spanish; call them three percent of the population spread over fourteen languages. And again, language differences may overlap with sensory disabilities and other socio-economic factors that may bear on how individuals can receive and comprehend urgent warnings.
We could argue about the precise statistics, but that’s enough to illustrate my dilemma. Sixteen languages times just two modalities (visual and aural) is thirty-two different versions of an alert, and even that’s a gross simplification. How can I generate them all in a matter of minutes? And how can I know who should get each version? Or must I decide that certain communities are just too small to serve? That’s not a position I’m eager to take.
THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND
So let’s approach this problem from a different direction. Are we actually talking about dozens of different messages? No, just a single message that needs to be presented in a number of different ways.
And do we know what the essential elements of an effective warning message are, regardless of how it’s delivered? Yes, it turns out that we do, thanks to a large body of social science research on the one common factor in all this, which turns out to be our shared human nature.
So might it be possible to create and deliver a single message to everyone in a standardized form and provide individual translation of that single message to the most useful form at each recipient’s end? It hasn’t been done yet, but we’re getting very close.
The Common Alerting Protocol is a tool for expressing a complete warning message in computerized form that can be transformed into a variety of formats as required. It’s a fairly new technology, but it has won acceptance at the federal level in the U.S. and broad adoption internationally. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission have specified it as the basis of a number of new federal warning programs, and a number of states and communities are already using it day to day.
But at present “CAP” is only being used in the deep plumbing of our public warning systems. It’s already delivering benefits in heightened efficient and warning system interoperability, but a much greater potential benefit has yet to be realized.
MASS PERSONALIZATION OF WARNINGS
Instead of trying to construct numerous different versions of an alert at the origination point, and then route them to the appropriate recipients, we are rapidly approaching the point where individuals’ personal devices can take a standardized signal, like a CAP digital alert, and display it in the most appropriate form. And since a CAP message uses selections from pre-enumerated tables to indicate the nature, urgency, severity, certainty and location of an alert, even automated translation on the recipient’s digital device would be much less challenging than the general problem of free-text translation.
Such a standards-based approach would take time to perfect, but could overcome both the origination bottleneck and the network bottleneck. More importantly, it could help overcome the political bottleneck.
BUILDING A LARGER COMMUNITY
The unhappy political reality of access issues is that there is an implicit competition for political attention and financial support among the various advocates for different groups. But the challenges of multi-lingual warning and of warning for people with sensory disabilities are only superficially different. At its root, the goal of mass personalization is shared by access and diversity initiatives of every kind.
It might be that the differences between the sensory-disabilities community and the multi-lingual community—not to mention the differences between young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural—are so deep and important that we can’t make a common cause toward this shared goal. It might also be that we can’t see past the urgency of our individual agendas—for who isn’t special in some way? —to take a strategic approach to the challenge of meeting individual needs in an impersonal world.
But if we continue to do what we’re doing, it seems reasonable to expect that we’ll keep getting what we’ve got.
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