Tuesday, 06 January 2009

Try a little MSI

Communities and Local Government today published guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' reassuringly sub-titled 'How encouraging positive relationships between people can help build community cohesion'.

It needs to be seen in the context of the work and recommendations of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, and more broadly of the debate on how policy can influence behaviour.

I happen to think this is an under-appreciated topic and deserves more policy attention, and more media attention, than it gets. And to be fair, the document also deserved a bit of copy-editing: that might have helped avoid the feeling that this theme is given a relatively low priority in a tiny corner of a huge government department.

Here's my quick take on it for the Joe Public blog.

 

6 Jan 2009 20:19:23 | Cohesion and diversity, Neighbourhood relations, Social policy

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Spare a thought It would be nice to think that organisations like the Dalia Association in the Palestinian Territories could really be given the chance to show what community development can do. (Thanks once again to Hildy for the link). Their site carries a thought-provoking note from Avila Kilmurray, Director of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland: What was overwhelming about the situation faced by the Dalia Association was the need to work in a society where freedom of movement is so stringently curtailed; where a people are grasping desperately at protecting their own story and culture; and where even the best efforts at reconstruction can be swept aside by the politics of the day. The pic is from the Dalia site, taken by Muthanna Al-Qadi.
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Social interaction and mobile technologies Keith Hampton describes research findings (in press) which suggest that social interaction in urban public spaces (parks, plazas, and markets) is likely to be more diverse than interactions through wireless internet use, which in turn are likely to be more diverse than interactions through mobile use. I think this is just what we would predict, because the serendipity potential of the mobile is negligible compared with face-to-face, and wifi use is more open to interruption than is mobile. But that doesn't mean it isn't reassuring in a way, and you can be sure the methodology was robust. It builds on Keith's previous paper which looked at wifi use in cafes and included consideration of the possibility of ‘contextual’ or ‘neighborhood effects’ within cafes, whereby the lack of sociability of some cafe users has the potential to reduce the overall sociability of a public space.

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