Community does more than give us a place to belong.

It gives us people whose opinions matter.

People we expect to see again. People we may need tomorrow. People who notice when we show up, when we help and when we don't.

That creates something we don't talk about nearly as much as belonging: accountability.

For generations, much of that accountability was informal. Family, neighbors, coworkers, congregations and friends created an unwritten set of expectations about how we treated one another and what we contributed.

You helped because these were your people.

You behaved differently because you would see them again.

You contributed because there was somewhere for your contribution to go.

Community gave us belonging, but it also expected something from us: participation, consideration, contribution and sometimes restraint.

Increasingly, we've traded some of those face-to-face interactions for windshields, screens and usernames.

We can connect with people almost anywhere. But anonymity changes the equation.

We may never see the person on the other side again. We may never have to look them in the eye.

And increasingly, the reaction of an audience can matter more than the expectations of the people around us.

That's where things get interesting.

A community has a stake in what happens next.

An audience rewards what gets attention now.

And attention doesn't always reward our better instincts.

Behavior the people around us might once have discouraged can now find an audience willing to applaud it.

We haven't lost our moral compass.

But we may have weakened some of the communities that helped us calibrate it.

Strong communities give us more than connection.

They give us somewhere to contribute.