When is a network of neighbours actually a neighbourhood?
How technology is changing the meaning of neighbourhood - from commons built on trust to a network built on surveillance
A new feature appeared in my Ring doorbell app this week, inviting me to join my Neighbours. I switched it off.
That wasn't because I object to knowing what's going on in my neighbourhood, or to helping someone whose dog has gone missing. Quite the opposite. I think a neighbourhood should be a place where people look out for one another. But I've become increasingly interested in a different question, which is what happens when technology starts to change not just how we take part in communities, but what we understand a community to be.
Amazon's Ring Neighbours launched in the UK on 21 October. It is a free, hyperlocal social network built into the Ring app, where residents can share information about suspicious activity, local incidents and lost pets. You don't even need to own a Ring device to join. Participating Ring cameras can also use AI to search recorded footage for missing dogs, with their owners deciding whether to share any potential matches. Amazon calls it "a new way to neighbour".
On the surface it all sounds rather helpful: neighbours helping neighbours, communities looking out for one another, technology making our streets safer. But I think it raises a much bigger question. Are we building neighbourhoods, or are we building networks? They are not necessarily the same thing, and the consequences of confusing the two may be far greater than we imagine.
What makes a neighbourhood?
Traditionally, a neighbourhood was a kind of commons. Not an idyll where everybody agreed or got along, but a shared social environment in which people lived alongside one another, built up common knowledge, negotiated common norms and took some collective responsibility for the place they inhabited.
In England the commons has a particular historical resonance. Common land was governed through shared rights and obligations, established through the relationships between people and place. The social commons of a neighbourhood works differently, of course, but it rests on a related principle: community is created and sustained through participation, familiarity and mutual obligation, rather than administered from above.
Even the founding philosophy of modern British policing reflected something of this. The ideal of policing by consent, associated with Robert Peel (a man of local importance where I live and held in high esteem) held that the legitimacy of the police depended on public confidence, cooperation and consent. The police were the public, and the public were the police. That ideal has never been perfectly realised, but the principle matters because it locates authority within a relationship between institutions and the people they serve. A neighbourhood, understood this way, was never simply a geographical area. It was a social relationship.
Now consider the architecture of the digitally monitored neighbourhood. People are connected through a platform and observe their surroundings through cameras. Events become recordings, recordings become alerts, and alerts become information circulating among people who may never have met. The neighbourhood is no longer just a place where people live together. It becomes a place they monitor together, and the rules of that monitoring are increasingly set not by the community itself but by a technology company operating from somewhere else.
The commons becomes a network, the neighbour becomes an observer, and the observed may become a suspect.
This is the distinction I think we are overlooking. A network connects people and devices. A neighbourhood is made of relationships and shared responsibilities, and of some sense of belonging. Connectivity is not the same thing as community, and a network can connect everybody in a street without making any of them better neighbours.
We've seen this before
Social media offers some important lessons here. When it first arrived, it promised connection, participation and the democratisation of communication, and in many ways it delivered. But over time we also watched divisions turn into factions, and accusation and public shaming become part of the everyday texture of online life. People who had come together to communicate began monitoring one another for opinions, language and behaviour they considered unacceptable. The technology didn't invent conflict, prejudice or tribalism, but it created new conditions in which those tendencies could be amplified, organised and sustained.
Now imagine bringing some of those dynamics into the physical neighbourhood. At first, everybody might take part in the spirit of community. Someone reports a suspicious vehicle, somebody else shares a lost-pet notice, another neighbour posts a warning about a break-in. But what happens over time, when neighbours begin to disagree about what counts as suspicious behaviour? When grievances develop and alliances form? When residents start using the platform not only to report incidents but to challenge the behaviour of the people living around them?
This leads to a question about what kind of behaviour these systems are actually designed to encourage. Are we building them so that people feel safer in their homes and become more security-conscious? Or are we building them so that people grow more suspicious of everyone they encounter, and more inclined to behave like snitches, watching and reporting on one another? Those are two very different social outcomes, and we shouldn't assume that a technology designed to deliver the first won't end up producing the second.
Ring has moderation policies intended to prevent harassment, discrimination and unfounded accusations, and those safeguards matter. But the wider social question remains. The people observing one another are not neutral observers. They are individuals with their own beliefs, prejudices and grievances. What one neighbour considers unusual, another might find entirely ordinary. And something that was once overlooked, misunderstood or sorted out over a conversation can become something recorded, reported and circulated.
Research on existing neighbourhood networks suggests we should take this seriously. A study published in New Media & Society, based on a survey of 1,806 US adults, found that people who used the neighbourhood platform Nextdoor more frequently reported greater concern about crime and greater openness to aggressive policing. The researchers couldn't establish causation, but the association is revealing. There is an important difference between making people aware of crime and making them feel that crime is everywhere.
A neighbourhood can become more observable without becoming more trusting. Indeed, the more we monitor one another, the more suspicious we may become, until eventually the object of suspicion is not the stranger passing through the street but the neighbour living next door. A platform that promises to bring a community together could, over time, contribute to the very divisions that undermine it. That outcome is not inevitable. But if social media has taught us anything, it is that the social consequences of a network are rarely determined by the intentions with which it was launched.
From local institutions to digital infrastructure
There is another dimension to all this that deserves more attention. For generations, two institutions played a particularly important role in creating local knowledge and maintaining public order: local journalism and local policing. Both have been under considerable pressure, though for different reasons.
The decline of local newspapers has left enormous gaps in community information. According to Amplify, the UK government's Local Media Action Plan published in March, at least 293 local newspapers have closed since 2005, and as many as 4.4 million people now live in local news deserts. The migration of advertising to digital platforms, changing commercial models and the growing dominance of global technology companies have fundamentally altered the economics of local news. Policing, meanwhile, faces its own challenges of resources, public confidence and changing forms of crime.
Into this environment comes a new kind of infrastructure: a platform through which neighbours can report incidents, share recorded evidence and potentially contribute to investigations. Ring has announced plans to bring further features to the UK, including Community Requests, through which verified public safety agencies would be able to ask residents to share footage voluntarily. Those features were not part of the initial UK launch.
Ring is not claiming to replace journalism or policing, and its current service doesn't perform all their functions. But elements of both are increasingly being reorganised through privately operated digital networks, and that matters. Local journalism traditionally carried responsibilities to investigate, verify and contextualise information. Public policing operates within legal frameworks of authority, accountability and due process. A technology platform has a different relationship with its users, one governed by product design, permissions, moderation systems, algorithms and terms of service. It may support public institutions, but it doesn't necessarily inherit their obligations.
For years I've argued that we are entering a period in which nations increasingly behave like platforms, while technology platforms increasingly perform functions once associated with nations. We are now seeing that transformation reach the most local level of all: the street, the neighbourhood, the community. Public services are increasingly mediated through digital infrastructure, while commercial platforms become part of the everyday machinery through which social life is organised.
None of this is necessarily a deliberate attempt to replace public institutions. But it can still produce a profound redistribution of social power. There is a critical difference between a local institution accountable to the people it serves and a global platform providing a service to people who happen to live in the same area. The first is, at least in principle, embedded in the community. The second is administered from somewhere else.
So what exactly are we creating when the institutions that once helped make a neighbourhood are progressively supplemented, mediated or partly substituted by a network?
The neighbourhood as panopticon
Jeremy Bentham imagined the panopticon as an architecture in which individuals could be observed without ever knowing whether they were being watched at any given moment. The possibility of observation was itself enough to shape behaviour. Michel Foucault later used the panopticon to explain how power could operate through visibility, monitoring and the internalisation of discipline.
The digitally monitored neighbourhood offers a contemporary variation. Observation is distributed among residents, cameras and connected devices, but the infrastructure through which that observation becomes shareable, searchable and actionable is governed centrally by a platform.
That doesn't mean Amazon is watching everybody's live camera feed. Ring says it does not give neighbours or public safety agencies unrestricted access to private recordings, users retain control over what they share, and the company has put moderation and privacy safeguards in place. Those distinctions are important. But the panopticon was never simply about whether someone is watching at a particular moment. It is about the conditions created by the possibility of being watched. When people know their movements might be recorded, circulated or reported, they may begin to modify their behaviour accordingly.
And when the observers are other members of the community, the consequences become deeply social. A neighbour who behaves differently, looks unfamiliar or gets caught up in a local disagreement may start to experience that community differently. The presence of the recording changes the relationship itself. Something that might once have prompted a conversation can now prompt an alert. A fleeting misunderstanding can become a permanent recording. A matter that would once have been settled between two neighbours can become an event circulating through a wider network.
The panopticon becomes distributed in its observation but centralised in its governance. Everybody can become an observer, and everybody can become the observed, but not everybody gets to decide the rules. Which leads to an even more fundamental question: who has consented to this transformation?
The difference between individual and collective consent
Ring, understandably, emphasises individual control. Users decide what to post, whether to share recordings and whether to take part in particular features. These are meaningful safeguards. But individual consent and collective consent are not the same thing.
I can consent to putting a camera on my house, to sharing footage, and to joining a neighbourhood social network. But the people who walk past my house, deliver parcels to my street or simply go about their ordinary lives have not necessarily consented to becoming part of a digitally monitored environment. Nor has the neighbourhood collectively decided that this is how it wants to organise community life.
The cumulative effect of thousands of individual decisions may be a new social infrastructure that affects everybody, including those who never chose to take part. That is a defining characteristic of the technological environments we are increasingly building: we make individual decisions about adopting technologies, but we experience their consequences collectively. A neighbourhood doesn't become a monitored environment because its residents have held a democratic conversation about their future. It becomes one because enough individuals have installed cameras, switched on features and joined platforms. The infrastructure accumulates, and eventually the social environment changes.
Individual consent to a technology is not the same thing as collective consent to the society that technology creates. That matters all the more when the environment being transformed is something as fundamental as the neighbourhood, because people can choose whether to join a social network, but they cannot so easily choose whether to inhabit the street on which they live.
When trust becomes verification
There is a final transformation, and it is the one that concerns me most. We often describe surveillance technologies as replacing trust. I think something deeper may be happening. They are changing what trust means, how it is established, and perhaps whether it is needed at all.
Traditionally, trust developed through relationships, familiarity, reputation, reciprocity and shared experience. We trusted people because we came to know them, or because we belonged to institutions and communities that established mutual obligations. Trust always involved a degree of uncertainty. We couldn't know everything about another person, and we didn't expect to.
Technology increasingly offers another route. We trust because something can be recorded, because an identity can be verified, because behaviour can be monitored and a system can produce evidence. Trust becomes less about relationships and more about visibility, less about knowing someone and more about being able to check up on them.
But verification is not trust. In some circumstances verification is necessary precisely because trust is absent. And when we start building entire social environments on the assumption that everybody should be observable and verifiable, we risk creating a world in which trust becomes harder and harder to establish.
There is a paradox here. A technology intended to make people feel safer may end up making them more suspicious. A system designed to encourage community participation may gradually erode the relationships that make community possible. And a network designed to help neighbours look out for one another may end up teaching them to watch one another instead.
The system and the self
This is a particularly revealing example of the relationship between System & Self. From the system's point of view, greater visibility promises more information, better coordination and potentially more effective responses to problems. From the individual's point of view, the same visibility can mean less privacy, diminished autonomy and the possibility of being judged or classified by people who know very little about you. The system gains information. The self experiences changed conditions of existence. Both can be true at once.
There are genuine benefits to acknowledge, too. Cameras can help solve crimes, digital networks can provide useful warnings, and AI may help reunite a family with a missing dog. Amazon says its Search Party for Dogs feature has helped reunite more than one lost dog a day with its family in the United States. That's encouraging, although a count of successful reunions doesn't by itself tell us how many of those dogs would have been found anyway through conventional community efforts.
The broader question is whether the good a technology can demonstrably do in particular circumstances is sufficient justification for the wider social environment that emerges once it is adopted. Technology doesn't merely help us perform existing activities more efficiently. It can change the activities themselves, along with our habits, relationships and institutions, and ultimately what it means to inhabit a particular social environment.
This is what interests me about the distinction between neighbourhood and network. A network is something that can be designed, optimised and administered. A neighbourhood is something people inhabit, negotiate and continually create together. Networks can support neighbourhoods, and may even strengthen them, but they should not be mistaken for them. Nor should their success be measured only by the number of connected cameras, alerts shared or incidents reported. It should also be judged by what happens to the relationships between the people who live there. Do they become more trusting, more cooperative, more willing to understand one another? Or simply more vigilant, more suspicious, and more dependent on technological systems to interpret the behaviour of those around them?
Neighbourhood or network?
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Ring Neighbours is the proposition itself. Amazon is offering a network and presenting it as a way to build a safer, more connected neighbourhood. But the two are not equivalent. One is an architecture of connectivity. The other is a social environment built through relationships, shared norms and mutual trust.
The question isn't whether technology can connect people who happen to live near one another. Of course it can. The question is what kind of community those connections create. Will we build neighbourhoods in which technology strengthens the relationships between people? Or networks in which relationships become increasingly unnecessary, because everybody can be monitored, verified and reported? The first would preserve, and perhaps enrich, the social commons. The second could replace it with something quite different: a monitored territory, governed through remote infrastructure, in which the language of community disguises an expanding architecture of observation.
That raises the question of who ultimately determines the future of our shared spaces. Are they shaped by the people who inhabit them, negotiate their norms and live with the consequences? Or, increasingly, by the platforms that determine how those people see, understand and respond to one another?
We should remember that connectivity is not belonging, and a network of neighbours is not necessarily a neighbourhood. Without mutual recognition, reciprocity and some degree of trust, it may be little more than a collection of people connected by a platform and a postcode.
Community is more than connectivity, and the commons is more than community. It is about what we share, the responsibilities we have towards one another, and our collective ability to decide the rules by which we live. A network can connect neighbours. But it cannot, simply by connecting them, create the relationships that make a neighbourhood, or claim the authority to govern the commons.
So when a neighbourhood becomes a network, we should ask not only what we might gain in safety and security, but what we risk losing in trust, belonging and our ability to shape our shared lives. Because a community that no longer requires trust may no longer be a community at all.