Small Town Syndrome

I'm from Norfolk. When people find this out they generally ask me [in a thick and ill-conceived West Country accent] do I live on a 'faaaaaarm', is my brother is my cousin and whether I have webbed toes.

Home is a small town on the Norfolk/Suffolk border called Diss. It has a population of around 7,000. Everybody knows everybody else. We use phrases like "that's on the 'huh" [it's a bit wonky] and describe things as "a rum do" [what a strange occurence]. Most people get married young and have babies. And yes, most people have a lot of cousins.

It is easy to make generalisations about a place, but as they say- there's no smoke without fire.

• Why are Northerners friendly and Southerners miserable?
• What changes a dialect, an accent- where do slang words originate and evolve?
• Why does a lifestyle differ from place to place?
• How did we come to forge these stereotypes?

OK, OK... so the socio-cultural, political, economical and environmental factors are obvious and hugely variable. That's not a project; that's common-sense.

What I'm interested in rather, is how behaviour begets behaviour in a small-town environment, and to focus on the material and tangible repercussions of collective social phenomena.

I want to investigate what causes localised mindsets and values, how our social networks (the figurative ones, not the digital ones I mean) cause us to think and act in certain ways;

• What are the effects of growing, living, interacting within a small, familiar community?
• How does that change the behaviour of an individual, or of a group, or even a whole neighbourhood?
• Why do we form perceptions of regions, and how do the ripple effects of close social networks manifest themselves?
• How does our environment effect us as individuals, and how does this in turn reflect on our environment?
• Would it be possible to use these patterns as a template to make predictions about a person's future?

Nicholas Christakis believes that traits are contageous. That we can 'catch' happiness and spread behavioural patterns such as over-eating or drug abuse through complex and enormous social networks. His theory is that these networks we exist within significantly affect our lives.

THIS SOUNDS FLIPPIN INTERESTING DOESN'T IT?