In recent years a large amount of literature has appeared concerned with the changes that the growth of the Web is leading to in the different areas of our day-to-day reality. In this sense, we can talk of transformations that are social, economic, cultural, political, artistic… Such literature sought, at first, to put forward a long series of technological innovations and to speculate on the social changes that these innovations might bring about. Characters such as cyborgs, socio-technological networks, and virtual communities were the permanent, privileged inhabitants of such texts. And now recently they have appeared en masse in scientific work in university disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, biochemistry and physics. The aim of this article is to look at the differences between these things but, above all, to analyse what they have in common. We believe that the notions mentioned, along with others such as hybrid actors, are metaphorical images intended to represent something new emerging in our day-to-day reality, a form of change that affects our daily lives. Our intention is to clarify this transformation and reveal the principal characteristics that define it.
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