We seem to be living in a world of polarised opinions giving rise to increasingly angry exchanges on television, print and of course social media. Aleks Krotoski asks how online anger works and is it a symptom or the cause of the problem. An enormous Chinese study demonstrated that angry content is the most shared across the web while US researchers have asserted that while we might not be any angrier than in the past we encounter much more angering content than ever before and that anger linger...
Apr 10, 2017•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores life in the digital world. What makes us laugh and why? And when so much of the web is there to tickle our funny bone, does anyone ever laugh out loud?
Nov 14, 2016•29 min
The world we experience through screen based technology is two dimensional which some argue creates distance between the viewer and the viewed but can modern day virtual reality story telling using a three dimensional perspective go further than any other medium of technology to enable us to really experience the lives of others, to walk in another man's shoes? Vicky Sutherland is mum to eight year old Arron who suffers from autism. Vicky tries to see the world through Arron's eyes as he suffers...
Nov 07, 2016•28 min
So much of our experience of technology can feel a bit like being haunted. It starts like any good ghost story with the just mildly unsettling; things aren't were you left them or seem to have moved on their own within our devices. Its a creepy feeling that leaves you unsure about what to believe. Our understanding of how much of technology works is so limited that when it starts to behave out of the ordinary we have no explanation. This is when we start to make very peculiar judgement's; "why d...
Oct 31, 2016•28 min
Our records define us - birth records, death records, crime records, marriage records - but what if you don't want to be defined by your records? And how do our physical and digital traces say affect us? In this episode of The Digital Human, Aleks explores these questions by hearing three very different tales of recorded lives...
Oct 24, 2016•28 min
In the spring of 1996, an enterprising American college student named Jennifer Ringley connected a webcam to her computer and began seven years of uninterrupted self-exposure. JenniCAM, as she eventually named it, was the first no-holds-barred lifelogging experiment on the world wide web. Every 15 seconds, the webcam uploaded another still image - from the mundane to the erotic - exposing the uncensored life of a young woman coming of age. The web at the time of JenniCAM was still in its infancy...
Oct 18, 2016•28 min
The way the digital world is presented to us can be alienating and obfuscating, bad metaphors like the cloud or the slow tracking shots between the banks of servers can make us forget that these networks are built and maintained by human beings. They can appear as something vast, unfathomable and otherworldly - a kind of digital sublime. Yet they exist in the same world as we do and have a physicality that's often lost on us. Aleks leads us on an exploration of this physicality from the digital ...
Oct 10, 2016•29 min
Why does a parent's awe over their child's ability with technology turn so quickly to fear? Aleks Krotoski explores the anxieties at the heart of modern parenting and tech.
May 09, 2016•28 min
From lost cameras, dogs, cats, phones and people, we are turning to the web to find what we have lost. Aleks explores whether you are more likely to find what you've lost using online social networks? Are we as connected as we think we are? Or does it make more sense to step out of the digital world and search with the help of physical social networks? Produced by Kate Bissell.
May 02, 2016•28 min
Aleks Krotoski compares our intuitive way-finding skills to those of the digital world and finds out why describing the best way from A to B still poses problems for tech. Simon Wheatcroft is an adventurer who's run all over the world and at distances that would make marathon runners shudder, he's also blind, he explains how he combined the sensations he gets underfoot with notifications from his fitness app to learn to run solo. Combining cues from the world around you to find your way is Trist...
Apr 25, 2016•29 min
Food is a universal necessity, human brains light up more for food than any other experience, so it's little wonder that food culture has exploded online. Social media is festooned with pictures, recipes, cooking videos and we can't seem to ever get enough. But, is the digital world doing more than getting our mouths watering? Could technology be changing the very way we taste? In this episode, Aleks Krotoski explores how food trends develop and shape our culture and spread on social media, as w...
Apr 18, 2016•28 min
In The Digital Human: Home Aleks asks what turns a space into a place and whether we really need bricks and mortar anymore, when home can be anywhere you can go online. Aleks visits Porter Ranch just outside of Los Angeles where residents were told to evacuate because of a gas leak. Linda Matthies decided to stay despite fears over her health. Her sense of home focuses strongly on the comforts of home and her many possessions acquired over her lifetime. Her sense of home is very much tied up wit...
Apr 11, 2016•28 min
In the 1st of a new series Aleks Krotoski gets down to work. From micro-taskers paid pennies to be the janitors of our digital services to car drivers jumping on the Uber bandwagon. Aleks speaks to technology writer Kashmir Hill who spent a month as an invisible girlfriend writing loving texts to service subscribers for a few cents per message. This is just one example of 'micro-tasking' made famous by Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. For Vili Lehdonvirta of the Oxford internet institute they'r...
Apr 04, 2016•28 min
Imagination is an essential component of what makes us human, it's complexity and artistry separating us from other animals as well as machines. Yet as digital technology progresses it's beginning to model this, once believed mystical, process. Aleks Krotoski explores the implications of this latest stage of digital evolution. Could the digital world fill the gap for people who are unable to imagine? Does the production of imaginative arts such as poetry indicate a level of humanity in our machi...
Nov 16, 2015•28 min
Since ancient Greece and probably before we've always used metaphors drawn from our current technology to understand our bodies. From the time of Newton we thought of the body as an elaborate clockwork device, the industrial revolution brought us the steam engine and the body became a system of pressures and levers. Aleks Krotoski asks what metaphor prevails in the digital era and what shortcomings in our understanding accompany these analogies. Producer: Peter McManus.
Nov 09, 2015•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores living in a digital world.
Nov 02, 2015•28 min
The online world abounds with doppelgangers, cyber-twins, bots and mind-clones; in this Halloween episode of The Digital Human Aleks Krotoski explores the uncanny world of these digital doubles. On the most simple level social networks and the now seemingly permanent cult of the selfie means that finding our visual double has never been easier. And its the appeal of this that was the inspiration for Niamh Gearney's website Twin Strangers where people register to hopefully track down their double...
Oct 26, 2015•29 min
Aleks Krotoski delves into vigilantism on the web and looks at the moral and philosophical implications of fighting the good fight in a digital space. Can we consider the web to be a superhero?
Oct 20, 2015•28 min
In the first of the new series, Aleks Krotoski explores how the web has influenced detection, from uncovering Osama Bin Laden to discovering the identity of long-abandoned Jane and John Does. As human beings, what is it in our nature that drives us to find out the end of the story - even when that story has nothing to do with us? The online world has made the detective mystery one in which we can all play a role. Hundreds of cold cases have been re-examined and re-explored by cyber sleuths aroun...
Oct 12, 2015•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores if we have all become digital hoarders. When our digital junk drawers are bigger than we can comprehend, do we lose the sense of what is worth keeping?
May 18, 2015•28 min
Aleks talks to Tinder users Harriet Southgate and Kira Cheers who speak not only about the seductive nature of the app, but how they promote the gamification of dating. Biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher argues that dating apps like Tinder and Grindr can cause cognitive overload because humans are just not used to having so much choice when it comes to picking a date. Aleks also speaks with Paul Ross, known as the Father of Seduction, about a rather chilling and systemised approach to seduc...
May 11, 2015•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the basic human impulse of people watching. We are aware how we perform when we know we are being looked at online but hear little about those watching.
May 04, 2015•28 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the overlap between technology and the natural world and how the two co-exist.
Apr 29, 2015•28 min
Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law goes "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So does that apply to the modern digital world, Aleks Krotoski asks the question with some surprising results. From people living under the 'curse' of electro-sensitivity to the rituals we all go through to ward off evil spirits like updating our anti-virus software. And she'll speak to the people teaching the language magic to technologists. In a world of install wizards and demon programmes ...
Apr 20, 2015•28 min
Secret holders share why and how they have used the internet to disclose their most intimate or well kept secrets - how does a compulsion to confess in a public setting effect those who the secret is about? And can this audition of secrets online naturally lead to revealing them offline? Aleks talks to her high school friends to unravel the secrecy about SARGON, an open secret society at her high schoo,l which she was never invited to join. She discovers the power of secrets for those on the ins...
Apr 13, 2015•28 min
If a driverless car has to choose between crashing you into a school bus or a wall who do you want to be programming that decision? Aleks Krotoski explores ethics in technology. Join Aleks as she finds out if it's even possible for a device to 'behave' in a morally prescribed way through looking at attempts to make a smart phone 'kosher'. But nothing captures the conundrum quite like the ethical questions raised by driverless cars and it's the issues they raise that she explores with engineer tu...
Nov 17, 2014•28 min
Aleks Krotoski examines what digital mapping has meant for our understanding of the world. Are we always aware of the decisions that make them look the way they do? Traditionally of course maps are as "authored" as anything else. As Simon Garfield writer of On the Map: Why the world looks the way it does , explains we should think of maps like the biography of a famous person; highly subjective and usually with some sort of angle. We hear this authorship at work when we join Bob Egan of PopSpots...
Nov 10, 2014•29 min
We live in a world where the nostalgia for the past now permeates our present. With online trends like 'Throw Back Thursdays', apps like Timehop and platforms which gives you the tools to make your digital image look like it was taken with an analogue camera, the internet has never seemed so backwards-facing. In this week's episode of The Digital Human, Aleks Krotoski visits imagined worlds and eras long past to explore whether the web is a nostalgia machine. We speak with Professor of Svetlana ...
Nov 03, 2014•28 min
What happens when we abandon a place? And why is it so difficult for us to leave these places behind? In this episode, Aleks explores abandon both on and offline. We tell the story of the only permanent resident of Fukushima's radiation exclusion zone. Naoto Matsura stayed in Tomioka while everyone around him fled. He's now the unofficial caretaker of this abandoned town. Aleks contrasts this with a remarkable example of digital abandon. Meridian 59 was the first massively multiplayer online gam...
Oct 27, 2014•28 min
We communicate with each other in more ways than ever and with an ever expanding range of devices and platforms. But they all piggy back on an earlier invention, our original social networking technology - language. In this edition of the Digital Human Aleks Krotoski explores the idea of language as a technology itself and how people over the years have attempted to improve it; re-engineer it for maximum efficiency, or use it as a lever of social change. She speaks to Professor David Crystal abo...
Oct 20, 2014•28 min
