Contents this month
Social networking systems and community cohesion
Following an article on Radio 4’s Today programme, last
week I joined up to Facebook, one of the new social networking
systems on the internet. My twenty-two year-old daughter who uses
it to keep in touch with her friends at university was not exactly
overjoyed. “OK, I’ll be your friend as long as you
don’t write anything embarrassing on my wall,” she
said. I have promised to behave myself.
I have belonged to electronic networking systems for business
before but Facebook and similar ones like Bebo and MySpace have
a much more personal flavour; they make it easy to have the kind
of mundane interactions that are the stuff of friendship.
Could systems like this contribute to community cohesion in
real local communities? In principle it is possible to set up
local groups that people could join if they live in the same
area, so that is not a problem. The real obstacle seems to be
about the way that we choose with whom to interact.
In a real community there are accidental interactions with strangers,
in the corner shop, the library and the pottery class. When these
people are different from ourselves in any of the obvious ways
like race or religion or even in terms of age or differing views,
brief, friendly interactions are good for social cohesion. They
help us to trust each other even when we are different.
Electronic social networking systems don’t yet have an
obvious equivalent of the corner shop. To enlarge your circle
of friends you can do a search using quite sophisticated criteria,
but surely these searches would always be based on our similarities,
not our differences. In giving us so much choice over our friends,
social networking systems as they are currently designed seem
to allow us to stay in the comfort of what we know.
Although community cohesion might not be improved much by such
systems, mutual understanding of people within a community can
certainly be improved using the right kind of software. Online
systems for public engagement can collect people’s views
on a contentious issue and then allow them to be read back by
the contributors in a completely transparent way. This allows
anyone who is open enough to listen to opposing sides of an argument
to understand the views of others. (It is hard to visualise this
without seeing an example. To see how this can be done in practice,
have a look at the online consultation we ran for Defra on England’s
Waste Strategy.)
Online consultations can make a contribution to community cohesion
because mutual understanding is an important step towards building
trust.
Gideon Mitchell
