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And secondly, it means that we need to be circumspect regarding solutions based
on purely technical approaches.
12.3.2.2
Consequences of Proliferation
As I have shown, stakeholders are expected to take more and more aspects of reality
(entities) into account when they process a warning. At some point, it may become
too much: making sense of the information overload becomes impossible and relevant
action ceases to be achievable. 6
Since using AEs as a basis for action requires contact with and understanding of
the entities within the AE, the proliferation observed brings several diffi culties:
￿ Retaining contact with all the entities becomes highly complex, because there is
'competition' between them, even with telecommunications: a mayor may be
logged on to the Internet weather maps and be on the phone to the countryside
warden, but he cannot at the same time also be physically watching the river and
closing the sluices. Actors can thus very soon fi nd themselves torn between
several imperatives associated with different entities competing for attention.
￿ It is from the point of view of understanding, interpretation, that the problem is
most apparent: for every new entity that joins the AE, interpretative frameworks
need to be developed through which it can be incorporated into the action pro-
cess. Developing these frameworks takes time and often requires the develop-
ment of specifi c information processing systems. This entails substantial
commitment by the actors and raises the question of whether the development of
interpretative frameworks can keep pace with the expansion of AEs.
￿ Finally, the action process requires the possibility of suspending the environ-
ment assessment phase, even temporarily, in order to decide on a course of
action (Thévenot 2006 ). But with ever more entities to consider, with different
timescales and a continuously evolving dynamic, it becomes very diffi cult for
stakeholders to escape from the process of incorporating the new entities which
is, potentially, endless.
Concretely, therefore, the problem will often be to reconcile spatially and tempo-
rally incompatible entities, and to close the assessment process in order to decide on
a course of action.
The extract below is a good example of this tension between the importance of
incorporating more factors and the diffi culty of escaping from this process of incor-
poration. It is drawn from an interview with a meteorologist:
So he [another forecaster], he's Mr multi-models! He looks at the American models a lot,
which not everyone does here. He follows them a lot, and there's also a Swiss model which
he looks at a lot, which is quite good on convection (…) So there are some who also look at
it when there are stormy conditions, to see roughly how the storms are moving. But all in
6 K.E. Weick has shown how the collapse of sense-making leads to inappropriate actions and then
disaster in the case of the Mann Gluch fi re in 1949 (Weick 1993 ).
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