The Bangkok Bombing Crisis

With globalisation, crises of today are increasingly having transnational effects. The advent of the internet, coupled with its convergence with mobile technology, has transformed crisis information dissemination. The rate of information sharing has increased tremendously with the advent of social media (Gruber, Smerek, Thomas-Hunt & James, 2015). Mobile technology has furthered this by allowing individuals to make videos of events as they occur and share them with the world anytime (Schumann, 2015). This has allowed people to move beyond re-sending mass media content to make their own versions of the crises (Utz, Schultz & Flocka, 2013) and transformed mass communication to “mass self-communication” (Castells, 2007, p.248). The energy of people

The various concepts, namely crisis as well as online information, emotion and action, are elaborated in this section to support the proposed research questions.
Crisis
Crisis could be at the personal level or shared with impact felt by many to the extent of bringing their lives to a standstill (Palen, Vieweg & Anderson, 2011). At an organisational level, crisis can be perceived as “an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes” (Coombs, 2012, p. 2–3).
Crisis can occur either suddenly or develop over time (Howitt, et al, 2009). Crisis disrupts regular daily routines and requires the routines to be re-organised (Palen, Vieweg, Liu, & Hughes, 2009). Crisis can “endanger the health or the environment, or seriously impact reputation or ability to do business” (Jaques, 2014, p.9). This will create emotional and cognitive disequilibrium which requires the individual to seek for the answer and make senses of the many answers among the changed

The Thailand authorities established a Centre to manage information and medical care of the injured and started a website, http://rps.pgh.go.th for the public to check for information (Ratchaprasong Bombing Incident Information Coordination Center [RBIICC], 2015a). Table 1 listed the nationalities and status of those who encountered the tragedy (RBIICC, 2015b). As the crisis had impacted tourists, international government agencies, such as Australia (Australian Embassy, Thailand, 2015), Japan (Ministry of Foreign Affairs [MFA] of Japan, 2015), Malaysia (MFA, Malaysia, 2015) and Singapore (MFA, Singapore, 2015) issued press releases and comments on the very next day after the bombing incident to express their condolences and carry advisories on