5. Communities and Associations

Communities are collective membership systems, intermediate between associations and polities. The rapid increase in the use of mobile phones and social media, especially by younger people, has reduced the face-to-face interactions on which traditional communities rely. Some of these media have enabled the rise of new kinds of collective action, such as the ‘Me Too’ movement of women who have suffered from sexual abuse. But the long-term effects of these technologies on communities and civil society associations are still largely unknown. There seems to be evidence that these forms of communication reduce conventional civility and enable insulting and degrading messages; for instance young minority ethnic people in the UK report many such incidents, even from fellow-students on university campuses. All this indicates the challenges for community-building in future.