Socio-Cultural Interaction and Networking: an Italian Experience

Considering interaction and participation as a pre-requisite for democracy is a must. But the equation: -web participation equals democratic total involvment- is far from being fully true and widespread. We anyway welcome the socio-cultural interactions and networking opportunities given to citizens to link them both to their local environment and to the wide community. The paper presents the first results and the theory behind the 'MuseoDiffuso' Project (Widespread Museum), a user generated content process activated to give birth to a cultural outcome in a UE Convergence area in Italy. The implementation of a 'cultural device', at the same time new as non existing before and old as a museum, has been the working ground to test our theoretical aim to reverse the usual path of a museum adopting new media, and create a different one: sharing the creation of a Widespread museum through new media. The 'MuseoDiffuso' project intends to link citizens, municipality, architect, scientists and stimulate their interaction. People have been involved through new media opportunities, in all the preliminary steps of analysis of the territory, historic and environmental aspects in order to finish up in building the collection to be set up as a widesperad museum. The work is still in progress but the aim is to end up not in the traditional opening of a virtual museum to public, but to set up a new concept of collecting and presenting artifacts. The chosen site in Southern Italy has a very high potential, interesting objects and a system of artifacts of very ancient origins. It has at the same time a lively community and many different associations that have been involved, although the digital divide is still quite wide, and this constitutes an additional challenge to the Project. The web generated content is managed by those who will actually build the Museum and constantly report either to the Municipality and to the end users/producers. We believe that the potential of this experience is very high and that it coul be a methodology to be applied to different situations, nations and local settings.