I think one of the defining characteristics for humans has always been the desire to dream up technology that can help make life easier. We would not be here if our ancestors had not stuck their heads out of the cave and started to explore what they could manufacture from nature’s offerings.

If you look at this from a very wide perspective, all the analog objects that we have can be considered to be life enhancement technologies. Clothing is “skin enhancement technology”. A bed is “rest enhancement technology”. A book is “learning enhancement technology”. Most everything we have has been invented to make life easier and better in some way.

What does all this have to do with digital technologies then?

The digital world is still very young so mostly it has been restricted to its own domain. The digital world has been considered to be virtual and people have been even experimenting with stand-alone virtual worlds (Second Life etc.).  Slowly but surely the digital world is crossing the border and creeping in to the analog one.

Currently the biggest obstacle is connectivity. Most of us have to possibility to be connected at home or in the office, but staying connected while on the move is still quite a hassle. It is only a matter of time when that problem will be solved and connectivity will be ubiquitous.

The constant connectivity will bring with it a new kind of reality. It will be a reality where analog and digital life enhancement technologies merge and bring us new enhancements. GPS-navigation technology is a good example of merging the analog and digital. There is no longer a need for a scaled down presentation of reality (a map), when in essence technology makes the map life-size.

Slowly but surely the analog life enhancement technologies that only have virtual value (the value is not in the physical properties of the object, but in what we can accomplish with it) will begin to slide in to the digital world. Staying on the subject, take for example street signs and maps. There is no value in the signs or maps themselves. The value comes from people easily finding where they are going. In an analog world you have to manually combine two enhancement technologies, the signs and the map, to find the shortest route to your destination.

Today, we think of the virtual and real world as two separate domains. The analog world is slowly being augmented with digital technologies. I am betting that sometime in the near future we will come back full circle and consider analog and digital to just be different aspects of the same real world.