Recently two Australian girls trapped in a storm drain in Adelaide chose to update their Facebook statuses with please for help rather than dial the local equivalent of 911. This has local officials worried, according to a spokesperson in the ABC News article:

“If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000 [the local equivalent of 911], so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”

This is a good example of what John Creighton and I see as a shift from an institution-centric world to a citizen-centric world. Public leaders can no longer expect citizens to act in ways that are convenient to instituions. Citizens instead expect institutions to conform to their needs.

However, not many public institutions have caught up to this fact. So, for example, the Adelaide, Australian emergency services office is “worried” that the girls did not use the right phone number.

It may be that, instead, citizens ought to be worried that the emergency services office has no way of monitoring a communications channel that is increasingly ubiquitous.

Indeed, the channel is so ubiquitous that citizens are forced to create workarounds to compensate for the failings of the official mechanism, as in this episode of which social media news site Mashable reminds us:

[I]n Atlanta, Georgia in May 2009, a councilman was concerned that his cellphone battery would be flat by the time a 911 call connected. Instead, he Tweeted: “Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet”.

This is one example of room for improvement when it comes to public instituions. Instead of trying to “educate” citizens to use the “correct” means of calling for help, perhaps public leaders ought to devote efforts to making sure there is a listening mechanism set up across the spectrum of daily-use communications platforms, not just one.