Exploring community cohesion in the age of digital society: a multidisciplinary study in Wales

This thesis investigates the intricate dynamics of community cohesion in Wales and the role played by digital technologies in shaping it. Community cohesion is essential to any functioning modern society, providing the social fabric that binds individuals and groups together. Various emerging challenges have threatened community cohesion in recent years, encompassing cultural polarisation, migration, economic inequality, and numerous others. These factors have created an environment where tensions between groups can escalate, leading to decreased tolerance and subsequent intergroup conflicts and social unrest (Legewie, 2013). While fundamental causal factors and spatial dimensions have traditionally received the most attention, evidence suggests that trigger events can also amplify tensions, resulting in temporal shocks. Social media has surfaced as an additional catalyst for heightening these tensions, enabling the escalation of intergroup conflicts. However, social media also offers the potential for positive outcomes, such as fostering community building and social support. Given the constantly evolving landscape of cohesion in both digital and offline contexts, this PhD research aims to investigate how cohesion is accomplished in Wales. Specifically, the study examines the current mechanisms to prevent tensions and the potential role of new technologies in these processes. This thesis focuses on the relationship between social media and community cohesion, utilising a multi-disciplinary outlook that includes digital communications, tension studies, and computational criminology.
The findings shed light on the multi-agency partnerships in Wales designed to mitigate community tensions and promote community cohesion. First, the Cohesion Delivery Network (CDN) in Wales was explored. It is important to note that given the absence of a pre-established formal multi-agency network, the researcher relied on their positionality within the Hate Crime Criminal Justice Board to define and establish working relationships that existed within the network. The researcher's unique vantage point provided insight into existing collaborative efforts. Consequently, while no formal cohesion delivery network (CDN) exists the researcher's role shed light on the informal network's composition and dynamics. The cooperation patterns were analysed in a network analysis to identify gaps and challenges in the network and how digital technologies have influenced and will continue to influence how the network operates. Next, a specific case study example of a trigger event for community tensions was explored: the announcement, duration, and closure of the Penally Asylum accommodation in Wales. This helped identify associative factors behind the manifestation and spread of intergroup tensions and the role that positive counter-speech can play in diffusing them following a local trigger event in both offline and digital contexts. In doing so, the study identified the extent to which particular social actors are endorsed or rejected and fundamental temporal and social patterns associated with the creation, propagation, and existence of tensoins during trigger events. The concluding section of the thesis explored the third sector's potential to employ social media in fostering digital environments marked by tolerance and cohesion to promote inclusive content and community building. Using Twitter as a public space application, the study found that such organisations harness social media to promote cohesion and collective efficacy using various strategies that ultimately interlink to address threats to community cohesion. Various research methods and tools were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from offline and digital sources, including survey data and extensive social media data scraped from Twitter.