Our brains are still running security software designed to protect us against lions, tigers and bears and we haven't run an update for about 200,000 years. Aleks Krotoski explores how well it works when faced with the risks of the digital world. According David Ropeik author and risk communication expert at Harvard University the modern technological world presents our risk perception abilities with much more complex and abstract problems than it was ever designed to cope with. For him we feel r...
Oct 13, 2014•28 min
Aleks explores how the digital world has changed our idea of selling. In a world where every click is a selling opportunity either for us or to us, how do we take advantage of the one without being taken in by the other?
May 14, 2014•28 min
Digital devices operate in binary ways; either they're working or they're a brick! Aleks Krotoski asks what this means for our natural instincts as tool builders and tool breakers? As technology becomes more resistant to prying fingers and minds are we losing the ability to imagine it differently? Take the dying art of tuning an engine it can make cars faster and more efficient but only comes through a symbiotic relationship between mechanic and machine and of course every child knows the joy of...
May 05, 2014•28 min
Aleks krotoski asks how human beings can cope with a world saturated by data. For some it is clay to be moulded and built with while for others it is the route to self knowledge. But it exists in overwhelming volumes like grains of sand on a beach. Turning it into things we can understand is now an imperative and artists and designers around the world are constantly looking for ways to summarise and symbolise what we are learning about the world around us through this tsunami of numbers. The pro...
Apr 28, 2014•28 min
Today tens of thousands of people run the Boston marathon amidst tight security. A year ago two bombs were detonated at the finishing line, killing three and injuring 260. Social media went into overdrive as people frantically pieced together clues which might lead them to the bombers. From this patchwork of evidence two suspects emerged and rumours began to spread. During the London riots in 2011 people tweeted photos of the London Eye ablaze. Rumours circulated that rioters had broken into the...
Apr 21, 2014•28 min
In this week's Digital Human, Aleks Krotoski asks if the digital world is robbing us of our voices. When we'd rather text or message than speak to someone, are we still listening? We're in a golden age of creating and sharing pictures, video and text, but what about the spoken word? Podcasts bring global radio to our ears, but when it comes to talking amongst ourselves, we're choosing not to speak. What role does the voice play in the 21st century - and now that there are so many other options -...
Apr 14, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the technology of time keeping. As clocks get more accurate and time becomes more abstract what does that mean for how we experience it? The accurate keeping of time allows our technological world to keep spinning and since earliest times has been central to how civilisation has developed. From the earliest mechanical clocks, the supercomputers of their day to the first wearable technology or pocket watch they've been at the forefront of technological advancement. But wha...
Apr 07, 2014•28 min
Do you feel in control of your technology, or is it the other way round? In this last episode of the current series of The Digital Human Aleks Krotoski asks if we could all do with a detox from our digital devices. It's a question she's increasingly been asking herself, which brings her to the couch of cyber addiction therapist Chris Mulligan. While there is no classification of cyber addiction in any psychiatric manual in the world there are clearly people who have problems switching off from g...
Feb 17, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores our lives in the digital world. This week she asks, are our connected modern lives making us lonelier than ever?
Feb 17, 2014•28 min
Here be trolls… What is it about the digital world that encourages normal people to disregard the rules of everyday life? Is it the cloak of anonymity the net offers? The social rules of online communities? Or simply human nature? This week, Aleks Krotostki delves into the dark side of the digital world to explore whether or not the internet fuels the breakdown of social and moral boundaries. She speaks to a troll who claims Jesus and Socrates as her forebears, Dave Eshleman who was one of the g...
Feb 10, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski returns with a new series exploring our lives in a digital age and on April Fool's day she explores whether mischief is an essential part of the online world. Mischief performs many functions in our society; the individual can use it to find their place in the world, while it can also level the playing field between the powerful and powerless. Follow and join the conversation on Twitter with #digihuman and find even more background on http://thedigitalhuman.tumblr.com/ . There's n...
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Join Aleks Krotoski as she explores chance in the digital world. Can life - changing encounters really be bottled, sold and exploited and what does the digital world promise for a future of serendipity. Can it really be engineered by digital systems?
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
At the Digital Death Day Aleks meets with Vered Shavit from Israel who having dealt with her late brother's digital legacy set up a website called Digital Dust to help others going through the same experience. Hearing Vered's story Alek's asks how are we using the web to adapt the rituals that we have used for centuries to help us transition between the living and the dead? Aleks discovers that since Vered's brother's death people continue to communicate with him through his Facebook profile. Dr...
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the digital world. In today's programme have we all become cyborgs without even knowing it? We've always extended our human bodies ever since we first picked up rocks or sticks as tools, it's part of human nature. So are the digital tools of today any different? Aleks asks just how far we've come and are willing to go to become one with our technology and become cyborg. Aleks hears from film maker Rob Spence better known as Eyeborg about the reaction he gets to the camera...
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski looks at whether how we tell stories has changed with the digital world. And it looks like it has much more to do with our distant past that we might think. She begins by looking at the online phenomena of the Slender Man a supernatural figure that's been appearing in pictures, blogs and YouTube movies since 2009 and is described as the first great myth of the web. Aleks speaks to AS Byatt to understand what story is for before examining how modern online storytelling bears a stri...
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski looks at whether we've all become techno-fundamentalists. Do we know what all our technology is for or more intriguingly what it wants? Aleks hears from Douglas Rushkoff about how the whole of the world around us has always been programmed by architects, religion, and politics. But it's something we seem to have forgotten about technology itself. Tom Chatfield discusses how the biases of technology (the things it naturally tends towards or is best at) interplay with human nature t...
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Aleks speaks to Grandmaster of memory, Ed Cooke who thinks memory is going out of fashion because of our reliance on digital devices. Mastermind champion and London cabbie Fred Housego explains how he relies on 'The Knowledge' to navigate London but relies on his wife's short term memory to remember dates for engagements, shopping lists, phone numbers. Psychologist Betsy Sparrow explains that this is known as transactive memory and it's exactly what we are doing with our digital devices. Cyborg ...
Jan 31, 2014•27 min
Aleks Krotoski explores what the digital world tells us about ourselves. This week: Influence. How has the digital world changed the way opinions are voiced and shaped?
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski returns with a new series of explorations of our digital world. In the first in the series Aleks looks at how different cultures are preserving their identity in the face of the homogenising effects of technology. There's a fear that the digital world will make us all the same. But that doesn't seem that well founded if you look at how widely differing cultures are using technology to express their identity and values. We look at the music sharing culture of Mali in West Africa as...
Jan 31, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski looks at group think in the digital world.
Jan 28, 2014•28 min
Join Aleks Krotoski as she explores love in the digital world. Can love be love when we're deprived of the sensory connections of face-to-face interaction? Love online doesn't need to be as wayward or incidental as it is in real life. In fact, Aleks will be hearing from those who think that love in the digital age leads to far deeper connections than we might imagine.
Jan 27, 2014•28 min
In this weeks edition of The Digital Human Aleks looks at what we believe and why. With a search for God throwing up nearly 2billion hits the claims that the internet would be death of religion seem a little hollow. So why does our web search for answers bring some people to god and turn others away? And why do we invest such faith in the answer we find online anyway? Aleks will look at technology as a force multiplier for religions and discover if we ever need to go to church again to practice ...
Jan 27, 2014•28 min
What is the biggest threat to our privacy: governments, corporate entities or our friends? And do people have different attitudes towards privacy depending on their culture?
Jan 27, 2014•27 min
Control is one of the big attractions of living in the digital world, we only post the best pictures of ourselves enjoying the best parts of our lives. But does that mean we start to treat our lives more like a brand, to be sold to our friends and protected from anything negative? Aleks Krotoski talks to Sherry Turkle director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and the Self to ask if this could cause us problems. She'll also find out what happens when you give up control of your online life or ha...
Jan 27, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski asks not just what technology can do for us but also what is it doing to us and the world we're creating? Each week she takes us on a journey to where people are living their digital lives to explore how technology touches everything we do both on and offline. Taking broad themes of modern living as a starting point she charts the experiences of homo digitas; both the remarkable and the mundane, to understand how we are changing just as quickly as the advances in our technology. W...
Jan 27, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores how technology can give someone back a life that had seemed gone forever. From a 93 year old painter whose failing eyesight has left him no option than to turn to technology, to an agoraphobic blogger who shares her thoughts on fashion online; technology can be the only means some people can express the things that are most important to them. Aleks Krotoski explores the stories of individuals who've become reliant on technology to keep living the lives they love. She also...
Nov 11, 2013•28 min
We might want to drown it out in light, but, as Aleks Krotoski discovers, darkness can be good for us. Electric light tampers with our circadian rhythms. Now we can light up any part of the day, our body isn't shutting off to sleep as easily as it once did. Aleks discovers the way that technology is starting to recognise this on both a personal level and a societal level. Produced by Victoria McArthur.
Nov 04, 2013•28 min
When almost anything we want is available to buy at the click of mouse and so much content is available for free, is the digital changing how we value things? Aleks Krotoski explores our sense of worth in this new world where the only thing that's scarce is scarcity itself. Do we connect with our possessions differently and in the end what is it that makes something valuable to us. Contributors Nicholas Lovell author of The Curve, Professor Chris Speed from Edinburgh University, Auctioneer and V...
Oct 28, 2013•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores whether technology has impaired our ability to wander. Now that off-grid is on-grid and we can send emails from mountaintops, have we sacrificed the pleasure of travelling to discover new places and ourselves?
Oct 21, 2013•28 min
Every week a million more people move to live in cities. Can they cope with this constant expansion? Aleks explores whether 'Smart' cities are the answer or do they come with a hidden price of personal freedom. She visits the world's "smartest" city, Masdar in Abu Dhabi and explores the social engineering that's as much part of the design as the bricks and mortar. Contributors: Physicist Geoffrey West, Urban Explorer Brad Garrett, Lean Doody from ARUP, Dr Iyad Rahwan, Architect and Artist Usman ...
Oct 14, 2013•28 min
