Something strange is happening at the bottom of our media garden. It's affecting how we will live, work and play in ways that could not have been imagined only a few years ago.

Televisions, telephones, computers, books and newspapers are tools designed to help us communicate better. It should be no surprise then that these communications tools themselves should eventually become better at talking to each other by the development of a "universal" language they all can use: a common digital code.

It's not a new idea. In 1887, a Polish physician, L. L. Zamenhof, designed what seemed to be the ideal communications tool, Esperanto, an artificial language to allow different nations to speak together with a common tongue. Maybe if he'd got a few more people interested we might all be talking Esperanto by now.

Until recently these technologies used different electronic languages to "talk" to one another or to bring us the news, weather and entertainment from our local radio, television, movie theatre or stored on records and tapes. Increasingly, these previously unrelated forms of media are beginning to speak a kind of Esperanto, a common language of communication: digital information. This communications protocol underlies even this article you read.

Household appliances, the stereo, computer, television set and even the humble toaster are being designed with digital communications in mind. This makes it much easier to buy one product that will work with others by simply "plugging in and playing" one with another, for instance, our computers with our televisions, our CD ROMS with the local library.

The idea is that your whole home will become programable. Just set and forget and your worries are over. And you thought you were having trouble programming your video! Wait until the kitchen appliances have a territorial dispute with the living room home entertainment system and you only have 30 minutes to tap in a digital detente to get the stove and telly working again before the guests arrive. Now there's a great career for an electronic Henry Kissinger in the near future, that's before the United Digital Nations Task Force steps in.

You might think it's a little strange to be talking about communicating with your house in the same breath as communicating with the world but it's no coincidence that Bill Gates is not only proposing to link his computer software globally but is, at the same time, building a $40 million "home of the future" in a lakeside suburb of Microsoft's home town, Seattle.

This demonstration home will feature the latest in presetable homeware: surround-sound home cinema and TV dinner ready and waiting when you get home and, the next morning, a friendly 6.00 am wakeup call from the President (or Prime Minister) welcoming you to another productive and creative New Republican day.

To Gates, as much as Rupert Murdoch, the only other media player to pull a sellout crowd just to sell them something, the home and the world are inextricably linked, if not yet in fact, then certainly in mind. Bill wants to provide a branded, proprietry version of his digital Esperanto, called here On Australia (MSN), and wants it to be thought of as similar to the VHS video tape standard everyone uses to put different forms of content or software on.

The difficulty for Bill and his rivals is almost no-one can use it because it's too hard to program. This difficulty will certainly not unite the world under one or two corporate logos, it will only serve to make the task of global communications, and an easily programable consumer lifestyle, a much more long term project.

In the end it will be you and I who will do the talking, no matter what system we use. Let's just hope the appliances don't end up doing it better than us. Otherwise the next time you try to program your home it might simply display a rude message on the television and begin blinking the house lights off, on, off, on, into the night.

And the toast will be burnt to a crisp.