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You may be wondering: If information is present everywhere around us, why make the distinction between physical and information environments?

Over the course of our history, our species has produced technologies that have improved our ability to communicate, store, and process information. The first—and still most important—of these is language, at first spoken and eventually written. Language allowed us to inform one another over space and time. You needn’t have been born in Rome around 60 BCE to benefit from Lucretius’s wisdom; written language allows the information he compiled to bridge the gap between your two lifetimes.

Over time, these information technologies have become better, faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous. Paper scrolls were an improvement over clay tablets, codices an improvement over scrolls, printed books over manuscripts, and so on. Eventually, the telegraph allowed us to tap electricity to transmit information instantaneously over long distances. This enabled people to communicate in (almost) real time while being in different physical places. The telegraph was followed by a series of ever-more-powerful information technologies: wireless radio, the telephone, and television, to name the most important.

Then, in the middle of the 20th century, a new information technology came along that would change everything: digital computers. Born of war, computers were initially conceived as super-powerful calculators to guide missiles. However, it soon became apparent that they could help us with all sorts of tasks that could be represented symbolically—even those that didn’t specifically deal with numbers.

Over the last five decades of the 20th century, computers became ever smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, and were eventually connected into a vast network that amplified their usefulness and power in previously unimagined ways. This computer network—the internet—has become central to our lives. We depend on it for all sorts of tasks, from keeping in touch with our loved ones to shopping to working to finding a mate. Some of us even wear internet-connected computers on our bodies, where they track our activities and occasionally prompt us to exercise.

Consider what happens when you chat with a friend using an app such as Apple Messages in one of these internet-connected devices. You and your friend are communicating in real time, even though your bodies may be physically very far from each other. While you’re chatting, neither of you are focused on your physical surroundings. Instead, your minds are operating within a context that’s defined by the chat app; the two of you are represented in the space as little images within circles, your words conveyed by speech bubbles, much like cartoon characters.

The chat application becomes your shared environment, its boundaries defined by the app’s user interface much as the boundaries of a physical room are defined by its walls and ceiling. You and your friend are sharing this environment, even though you’re not physically in the same place. This environment is made almost entirely of information; you can’t eat or sleep or exercise there. (But you can find out where you’re going to eat, how deeply you’ve slept, and how much you’ve exercised.) Hence, while you’re chatting, the two of you are inhabiting a shared information environment.

Physical environments are not all the same. A conversation held in a confessional in a church has a very different character than one held in a beauty shop or coffee house. The same is true of information environments; a conversation that happens in Apple Messages (where you’re afforded some degree of privacy) will have a different character than one held over Twitter, which is more public. Information environments create contexts that influence our behavior and actions.

The writer and designer Edwin Schlossberg said, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”⁶ I think the skill of designing—especially designing software—is creating contexts in which other people can work, learn, play, organize, bank, shop, gossip, and find great gelato. We’re in the process of moving many of these activities, which we have heretofore realized in physical environments, online. The impacts of this transition on important aspects of our lives—how we shop, work, learn, and more—are worth considering. Let’s look at some now.