Digital Sprocket

There was a day, long ago when no human lived inside a house. That’s a difficult concept to wrap your head around, because most of us spend most of our time inside houses, offices, factories, or other man made environments. In the past hundred years we’ve also built a wide variety of mobile environments like cars and airplanes. These structures provide many benefits. They help keep us warm in winter, cool in summer, improve food storage, protect us from predators, and generally make our lives better. It’s hard to picture life without even a grass hut or an improved cave, but there was a time before these inventions.

Humans lived for centuries before we invented structures. People were born under the stars, squatted in the wind and rain, found mates, and propagated the species without the benefits of buildings. The eventual shift from living under the canopy of the heavens to the ubiquitous use of buildings had a profound impact on human society social structures. Social interaction tends to shift from the family to the community of people living near each other. Hierarchies based on possession can evolve like city-states, and monarchies. Even warfare makes more sense when the warring parties own towns and cities. The changes that moving into structures has caused or contributed to are so widespread that they are often hard to identify.

Human society is on the cusp of a similar change. We are moving from physical environments to digitally manufactured environments. Now I’m not saying we live in cyberspace, but we are spending more and more time in electronically generated spaces of our own choosing. What is making this possible is the ubiquitous spread of portable digital hardware, especially networked devices. When I drive down the street, I see many people with head bowed and headphones in their ears. They are text-messaging friends, playing video games, or watching videos. The first thing many of us do when we return home, or enter our office is turn on the computer and jump into our email.

Other authors have previously noted how online relationships and communities are affecting society. They tend to be geographically dispersed, open to new members, but insular in ideas. New cell phone applications and handheld devices that take advantage of wireless networks are starting to allow us to take these communities with on the road, outside our structures. Add to that the ability to constantly choose our own audio input, whether that’s rock and roll, ocean waves, or an audio book, and the ability to choose video for visual stimulation, and you have something as profound as building a house. We do not know what impacts this will have on our society. After all, it took millennia for us to build houses with air conditioners, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, even furniture, and just as long to build the society I was born into. What form of society will our children be born into and inherit?