Humans are distinguished from all other living systems by their "toolmaking" skills, progressively dominating the planetary surface through tool making, agriculture, harnessing of stored energy, and industrialization. The latest phase in this coevolution of humans and technology is communications technology which has progressively extended individual awareness beyond the face-to-face community since at least Gutenberg. Books, newspapers, transistor radios, cassette players, and video have each contributed to major historical change. Some new communication technologies like magazines in the late 19th and first half of the 20th Century proved to be an integrating force socially. Some, like broadcast video, have undermined traditional communities more than they have helped develop new functional communities based on shared values and mutual obligations.
New interactive electronic communications during the early decades of the 21st Century will strongly impact individuals and groups, perhaps as much as broadcast radio and video have shaped the 20th Century. What about the longer-term -- are we on the way to being a new colonial species, Homoe communicatus? Where might this coevolution lead?