During the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve been doing a lot of “remoting” on our computers and smartphones: remote work, remote school, remote health care, remote entertainment and remote socializing with family and friends. It’s nice to think that when the threat of COVID-19 is over, we’ll simply go back to our old ways of interacting with people in person.

To some extent, we will of course. But how people interact with each other was evolving well before the pandemic, with electronic apps such as email, instant messaging, social media and video calls. To take the long view, since the emergence of our species Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, until the mid-19th century, the only way people could interact with each other was face-to-face.

That has changed.

In 2019, we observed the 150th anniversary of the driving of the famed “golden spike” to link the Eastern and Western U.S. by rail. But more significant for human interaction were the “golden sparks” of the telegraph, with transcontinental wires being strung a few years earlier.

Think of it as the first wide-area network, its input/output device a telegraph key to tap out the “dits” and “dahs” of Morse code.

Our ancient ancestors lived in the Stone Age, but this was the beginning of the Electric Age. Among the early enthusiasts for the telegraph were Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and President Abraham Lincoln, who, during the Civil War, sent his generals some 1,000 of what he called “lightning messages.”

The telephone soon followed, and then electric power lines. An early demonstration of lighting streets, stores and offices with electricity took place in Great Barrington in 1886. It was the first such use of alternating current, AC, which became the standard form of electricity we use today.

This was made possible by the electrical transformer developed by William Stanley, a Brooklynite who relocated to the Berkshires and for whom the industrial park in Pittsfield is named.

In the 1930s, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt undertook a program of rural electrification to power up areas still in the dark, and today essentially everyone in the U.S. has access to electricity. Some, however, are still on the wrong side of the “digital divide” for access to the internet. That problem is being solved in Western Massachusetts by the initiative and financial commitment of many small towns acting individually or collectively through the municipal cooperative WiredWest. (I was one of its founders 10 years ago.)

With the widespread availability of electricity and the internet, we have become intricately interconnected through our computers and smartphones. Increasingly our interactions with other people are more electronic than face-to-face, and will continue to be post-pandemic. Think about who you communicate with and how. And think about how different our lives are than those of our forebears of only a few generations ago, before the availability of electricity.

So different, in fact, that I believe we’re evolving into a new species of human: Homo electric. Not in the future, like in some sci-fi movie, but right now. If you merely examine our physical makeup, we aren’t significantly different than our sapiens ancestors. But we think and behave in radically new ways, and with radically new adaptations to old ways.

The theory of evolution was proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859. He argued that species change slowly over time through small advantageous variations in traits which natural selection passes on to their descendants, what came to be known as the “survival of the fittest.” Until recently it was widely accepted that the genes in our DNA are the sole determinants of our traits and thus of how we evolve. But new evolutionary thinking in the 21st century points to other factors which affect how genes behave, including cultural evolution and the environment.

It is not just our physical selves which evolve. So, too, does the culture in which we live, by which I mean not just art, music and literature, but our society in all its aspects, including science and technology.

It is only humans among all living creatures who are truly cultural beings, and cultural evolution is being recognized as a powerful force affecting genetic evolution. Modern medicine can help the less fit to survive and reproduce, negating natural selection.

We recently achieved the capability to edit DNA.

In the Electric Age, we live in a culture based on electricity. You can turn off your devices for a day, go camping off the grid for a week or, as I once did, live for two months in the Peruvian Andes without electricity. But you will be glad to resume living in an electrified world. It is our natural habitat. Almost nothing in our lives would be the same without electricity. How we choose to live in that world is up to us.

Steve Nelson, of Washington, Mass., is the author of “Homo Electric: How Coronavirus, Social Media and Climate Change Are Accelerating Evolution of a Dynamic New Human Species.”