During my masters, I had the opportunity to take an optional module in environmental psychology (EP). In my ignorance, I thought I was going to learn how to convince people to hug trees. I had no idea that the University of Surrey was one of the world's leading institutions for exploring how individuals relate to their built and social surroundings. I may not have learned how to get people to recycle, but I did discover what effect our interactions with the web have on our understanding of what we think of as home.

The woman who led the course was a thoughtful academic called Gerda Speller. Her research concerned itself with the human impact of community migrations. She had worked on the Eurotunnel project; consulted on how to help displaced people re-find their networks and themselves; and she'd unpicked why centuries-old neighbourhood bonds fell apart when a Northumberland community was moved to a planned development after they discovered that the mine they'd lived above was spewing noxious gas.

Speller's work focused on the enigmatic yet human-centred concepts of place-identity and place-attachment. Simply, she sought to understand how spaces become places because of how they are laid out and how houses become homes because of the amount of ourselves we put into them. These are emotional distinctions that are difficult to quantify, but as EP theorists such as Harold Proshansky proposed, and Speller found in practice, they are essential qualities for both the success of spaces, houses and communities, and the psychological well-being of the individual.

Over the last 20 years, we have been encouraged to think of spaces on the web as our homes, from infinitely adaptable personal home pages that we decorate like the walls of a teenager's bedroom to readymade web hubs such as Facebook in which we surround ourselves with people and properties that are meaningful to us. In two decades of web research, countless studies have recounted the ways people create environments that signal belonging and identity using text and multimedia in the same way as DIY junkies use paintbrushes and plasterboard. This research has also encountered what's happened to virtual place identity when personal online artefacts are compromised: the sanctum is invaded, and people move on.

What the web has inspired, then, is a postmodern understanding of what "home" is: a de-physicalised, conceptual and psychological phenomenon that externalises its invisible meanings. And interaction designers recognise this: the web is another castle that the Englishman can live in, and he seeks to create virtual places that have as much effect on pride, self-esteem and identity as the bricks and mortar version where he sleeps.

But the web has done more for home than this – it has invaded our domestic space. According to the Office for National Statistics, 77% of households in Great Britain had an internet connection in 2011 and initiatives spearheaded by the government aim to achieve near-ubiquitous national connection by next year. We have no choice but to welcome it – and everything it brings with it – in. As Michael Arnold explains in The Connected Home: Probing the Effects and Affects of Domesticated ICTs: "Homes were connected electronically to the outside world less than 100 years ago. And now… the homes of many… connect directly to friends, acquaintances, and… million[s of] strangers: to the local community, to work, to social, political and commercial organisations, to entertainment and service providers."

As if there wasn't already enough going on under the surface in each home – from age to identity to gender politics – this networked technology brings the influences of these other stakeholders to bear on how we engage with the people with whom we share our most intimate lives. And we are now in the process of negotiating new boundaries with our time, our attentions and our domestic hierarchies.

I am constantly connected when I'm at home. It is my companion when watching a movie, it is my entertainment system when listening to the radio, it is my connection to the family and friends I speak with on VoIP. Sociologist Kat Jungnickel and anthropologist Genevieve Bell suggest that my over-networked experience isn't unusual in Home is Where the Hub is? Wireless Infrastructures and the Nature of Domestic Culture in Australia: "Some read their emails and Google for news in front of the TV while others breastfeed while surfing the net. In the kitchen, they look for recipes or talk with friends via IM. In bed they write emails or shop on eBay." The rooms once allocated for specific purposes have been co-opted by other (digital) tasks.

This isn't always welcome. In one of Jungnickel and Bell's case studies, a participant describes the conflicts that arise from home-multiplicity: "Sal tells of the congestion zone caused by the chameleonic characteristics of the kitchen table," they write. "During the day it is her new computing space, and at night it is the social, cooking washing-up space for both of them." Each online activity has imposed itself on our home-practice. We are experiencing a domestic transition as the web collaborates and competes with old "new" technologies such as the TV, the researchers argue. It "complicates" characteristics of the physical space.

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

My home is most certainly my hub. I couldn't live without it.