Editor’s note: Mitch Eggers is chief scientist at Lightspeed Research, Bellevue, Wash.  

In 2018, 2.5 billion people will own smartphones.

These incredible devices allow people to create digital neighborhoods of their own choosing, and then take them along everywhere they go. Consumers are constructing and migrating to these digital neighborhoods at an extraordinary pace, which puts a premium on understanding how they work.

Human ecology can help us understand. The fundamental concept at the heart of human ecology is that spatial distributions like the neighborhoods people live in and how they are arranged reflect social organization. This is why sociologists, anthropologists and urban ecologists measure neighborhood integration and segregation. If we don’t live in the same neighborhoods, it is unlikely we will interact socially.

Market economics sort people into physical neighborhoods, but people can and do buy their way into neighborhoods with good schools, good amenities and even a good yoga studio or two.

Digital neighborhoods have different sorting mechanisms; it’s not about ZIP codes, race or economics. The Internet has removed nearly all the friction of physical neighborhoods. Distance from one Web site to another is essentially non-existent. Most sites are free or have cheap paywall hurdles. There is almost no way to discriminate; everybody gets the same offers and apps to build their digital neighborhood.

Fragmented digital neighborhoods

Urban ecologists might have expected that integrated digital neighborhoods would reinforce our shared social fabric and diversity. Unfortunately, people have sorted themselves into fragmented digital neighborhoods based on tastes, preferences, personalities and beliefs. To understand what happened and what it means for consumers and brands, we need to turn first to economics, then to psychology.

Economically, low costs make digital niches viable. It also costs much less for consumers to find specialty sites. Search engines allow consumers to search, evaluate and buy a specific item. A niche site is as affordable to support as a consumer micro-market.

These economic advantages are reinforced by the fact that people seek and enjoy information, news and commentaries that agree with or confirm their values and beliefs. Psychologists have also found that we ignore, disregard or otherwise filter out facts that are at odds with our beliefs. Brain scans show that such dissonance activates the fight-or-flight circuits in our brains. In fact, when confronted with challenging facts, we hold our existing beliefs evenly more strongly.

This is part of our innate need and desire to belong.

In Maslow’s hierarchy, belonging is what comes next after our physiological and safety needs.

With these lessons in mind, we can begin to make sense of today’s digital neighborhoods. An explosion of choice paired with confirmation bias and a need to belong drive selective sorting and a hardening of opinions and tastes. But it also creates opportunities for brands.

The depth of engagement in digital neighborhoods is very strong, stronger than might be expected based on studying physical neighborhoods. Digital neighborhoods have come together around shared interests that are not constrained by things that have affected physical communities. As a result, digital neighborhoods are strongholds of intense emotions and attachments, one of the biggest realizations to come to the fore over the past year. But extreme politics are not the only thing to have taken root in digital neighborhoods. Extreme engagement with brands, both new and old, can be found there as well.

Consider the Instagram fashion influencer Arielle Noa Charnas who blogs at SomethingNavy.com. She built a following and became an influencer. As her following grew she crossed over from individual to brand, and then to purveyor of fashion items through a partnership with Nordstrom, which reached out to stock items her followers wanted. Within 48 hours of posting an excited, emotional announcement, she received over 3,500 comments and requests. Charnas launched the Something Navy brand as a capsule collection with Nordstrom’s Treasure & Bond, and Nordstrom donates 2.5 percent of its sales to organizations that empower youth.

This has many classic components of great brand building applied in a guerilla fashion within Charnas’s digital neighborhood. She has authenticity, trust and transparency. She has a direct connection with her followers and she gives them all the credit for her success. And she gives back.

Another example of creating success with digital neighborhoods comes from Chip and Joanna Gaines. One of their house flip projects was written up on a popular blog. A producer read it and after some due diligence, the HGTV show Fixer Upper was launched. Chip and Joanna pursued a digital strategy along with the TV program by embracing home-related topics found on Pinterest and Instagram. The result was a hit show and over eight million followers on social media. Their franchise includes a quarterly magazine, a retail destination in Waco, Texas, a capsule collection with Target, and their lines of paint, rugs, wallpaper and furniture. It is another bottom-up success built by understanding the depth of connection inherent in digital neighborhoods.

 The future may be fragmented and polarized, but it is sorting itself out in a new kind of neighborhood – one with the passion brands covet and one with the kind of access all brands ca