Today I know that I am bold, rebel­lious and ego­cen­tric to per­ceive, under­stand and inter­pret the world in terms of meme, to intro­duce the def­i­n­i­tion of a new species to the world. This is who we have evolved to become.

Homo dig­i­taus — n. The mod­ern species of humans, evolved from extant Homo sapi­ens of the pri­mate fam­ily Hominidae.

This species of Humans is hyper­so­cial by nature, uniquely adept at uti­liz­ing dig­i­tal sys­tems of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for self-expression, the exchange of ideas, and orga­ni­za­tion. They cre­ate com­plex social struc­tures com­posed of many coop­er­at­ing and com­pet­ing groups, from fam­i­lies, friends, pro­fes­sions and com­mu­ni­ties to sub­cul­tures and nations.

Homo dig­i­taus (HD) humans view their global duo-plane social inter­ac­tions as multi-dimensional, threaded and seam­less. The con­cept of time and real­ity of dis­tance are dimin­ished by HD humans, whose rela­tion­ships are devel­oped in real life (IRL) and via fast-paced dig­i­tally streamed, per­ma­nently foot­printed viral social inter­ac­tions, reflec­tive of an extremely wide vari­ety of val­ues, social norms, and rit­u­als. They per­ceive vir­tual rela­tion­ships as real and impor­tant as phys­i­cal ones and main­tain a deeply seated psy­cho­log­i­cal need for hyper­con­nec­tiv­ity to their social networks.

HD humans base social strat­i­fi­ca­tion on influ­ence or reach within social net­works. Their innate marked appre­ci­a­tion for beauty and aes­thet­ics com­bined with a char­ac­ter­is­tic trait of com­pet­i­tive­ness and desire for self-expression, has led to per­va­sive and com­pul­sive ten­den­cies to repet­i­tively share dis­cov­er­ies of art, lit­er­a­ture and music, and track the amount of times their con­tri­bu­tions to the global vir­tual com­mu­nity have been for­warded by others.

HD humans, noted for their desire to under­stand and influ­ence their envi­ron­ment, seek to explain and manip­u­late nat­ural phe­nom­ena through tech­nol­ogy, sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy, mythol­ogy and reli­gion. This nat­ural curios­ity has led to the devel­op­ment of advanced tools and skills, which are passed down cul­tur­ally, vir­tu­ally and virally as a result of cloud men­tal­ity, a gen­e­sis of the Homo sapien crowd men­tal­ity. When Humans social­ize IRL they tend to rebuke pre­vi­ously tra­di­tional social gath­er­ings and com­mune with assis­tive mobile tech­nol­ogy used to com­mu­ni­cate in the indi­vid­ual or group social set­ting, com­monly a tweetup or unconference.

Humans are the only species known to build fires, cook their food, clothe them­selves, and use tech­nol­ogy — all at the same time.

My inspi­ra­tion for this post came from read­ing Tim­o­thy Leary’s Chaos & Cyber­cul­ture — some minds are truly vision­ary and coun­ter­cul­ture. Though they may reside in peo­ple who are mis­un­der­stood and lead trou­bled lives we should never dis­credit their thoughts.