Why an Emergency Alert System isn’t Adopted: The Impact of Socio-Technical Context

The purpose of this study is to understand the laggard adoption of an SMS-based emergency alert system on a university campus. Based on findings from in-depth interviews and a focus group, we discuss some critical issues in designing and implementing such alert systems, with a focus on the sociocultural factors that de-motivate people to use them. Our findings show that, even for a system with simple technology, the adoption process involves complex interactions between individual perceptions and the social context in which the system is situated.