Can We Still Talk About a Community?

Atkinson (1994) suggests that the school is where the main area of study should be as it is the bases on which community lies. This is because the school is where the child is molded and becomes the individual that will go on to become a member of society in the future and thus the school is what formulates future society. One can from this say that what is taught at school would have a significant impact on what happens in the wider society. We can already see that mercerization has come into place in the school system as well, whereby school planners have company logo’s printed in them.

As the internet has come into almost every house in the UK and Bradford is no exception to this, there is the creation of a new kind of community. One known as a virtual community whereby people form emotional and moral bonds without actually physically meeting each other. These communities can lead to friendships and other relations which at times can be stronger than relations people have with friends who they do meet. This type of community is still under question, and scholars are debating weather this is actually a community or not due to the fact that it is not a materialistic relationship where there is physical contact of people and there is a physical presence of the community in the life of an individual (Benton 2001). It can be argued that this is no different to the community that was formed by letters in the 17th century by scholars which was known as the Royal Society of London (Pears 1998)

We can see that there are many words that community can be interpreted to mean, as it has been said the geographical community no longer exists because communications and travel in the urbanized area’s are very good, thus this means that the community can be wider than a geographical location. This is especially true with the introduction of the internet whereby communities can form trans-nationality and without even a common first language as the main language on the internet is English. Also community has been largely over-looked by writers because it is not measurable and can not be located as a community can be very versatile and spread across a large region or into many countries. This has led to authors writing about network systems, which in essence are what traditionally would have been called communities, as they have the same characteristics that are used to describe a community. Communities still do exist although they are not as clearly defined as they have previously been, whereby a community could be attributed to a locality.