Looking at the United States Department of Homeland Security’s PDF for their Resolve to be Ready 2012 Campaign, it’s apparent that the U.S. government is very CMC goal oriented when it comes to distributing pertinent information. There is a lot of effort to get their latest PDF for the Resolve to be Ready Campaign 2012 out for mass consumption, probably due to the trend of public superstition surrounding the end of the Mayan Calendar during December of 2012. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that, “2011 has seen more billion-dollar natural disasters than any year on record, according to the National Climatic Data Center” (Resolve to Be Ready 2012). Looking at just global natural disasters from 2011, there is a real need for people have a practical and immediate knowledge base for emergency preparation and alertness. For example on page 6, FEMA’s Resolve to be Ready 2012 PDF has a list of sample Twitter messages for organizations to post with the “#Resolve” hash tag. FEMA suggests, “this New Year’s, #Resolve to update your emergency contact numbers and emergency communications plan (“Resolve to Be Ready 2012“). They encourage people to seek out websites like the CitizensCorp.Gov, so that even if broadcast emergency communications are not available, people will still have the preemptive opportunity to get local advice as to what small and large scale emergencies are most likely to happen to someone within a certain geographic location. There are community action PDFs for anything from snake bits to earth quake action kits.

In Palermo, Italy, Marianna Lya Zummo studied the effects of blogging about the H1N1 Virus Emergency and objectivity of the medical professionals and the subjectivity of the average bloggers. She found that although medical H1N1 blogs from places such as family service sites and sites from the Secretary of Italian Specialized Medicine, were all information heavy and objectively focused on tips for containment, the overly subjective quality of the responses from some of the bloggers left a lot to be desired as for what the purpose of them visiting the sites in the first place was. She noted at one point that, “the focus of the study was to look at blog comment entries, and study the participants’ representation of facts and their commitment to the truth of the proposition” (Zummo 2010). She points out that from the three health and science weblogs that she studied concerning the H1N1 Virus, a majority of the users that participated in comment boards were more concerned with the credibility of the facts in terms of where “who” they were coming from. People were questioning the quality and source of information on the blogs, and not really seeming to refine what the authors were saying. However, the limits to the study were that not everyone that visited the site refuted the authors posts, and the people that were being studied were only the ones that were commenting on the author’s validity. Here it becomes apparent that there will always be skeptics, especially with the availability to access resources like government H1N1 blogs. However, once the information is out there, such as the suggestion from the Department of Specialized Medicine, to wear a mask for two weeks to be safe during the H1N1 scare, anyone that reads it can either take the advice, or not.