From the telephone to the internet, technologies have historically transformed what is meant by community, and how communities are lived. What happens to the notion of community when our interpersonal and institutional relationships are not only increasingly "virtual", but also increasingly "mobile"? 

It seems that in a social world increasingly mediated through mobile technologies, individuals are becoming more visible, more transparent and more accountable to others – firstly through the permanent communicative connections mobiles create, and secondly through the capacities of the technology to generate information about individuals. Drawing on qualitative and ethnographic research in the UK, this paper discusses the implications of mobile visibility and accountability for how we understand community. The paper argues that community relations should be understood as networks of trust that are established contextually, the most important factor in forming trust being reciprocity in visibility and knowledge, and thus reciprocity in the power relation implicit in that knowledge.