Part of a Master thesis titled “Valuing Volunteers: Better understanding the primary motives for volunteering in Australian emergency service”, this discussion paper explores the broader social and cultural contexts for volunteering, highlighting the implications of changing core values for future forms of civic participation, including formal emergency service volunteering. The paper concludes that technology is rapidly accelerating the processes of individualisation and social atomisation, with a community-wide decline in altruism reflected in a fall in the rates of formal volunteering and changes in the nature of civic participation.