The Digital Human

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 unce...

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 physica...

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.

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.

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...

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, Al...

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...

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 famo...

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 imagi...

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 shortcoming...

Aleks Krotoski explores living in a digital world.

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 f...

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?

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...

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?

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 P...

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.

Aleks Krotoski explores the overlap between technology and the natural world and how the two co-exist.

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 peop...

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...

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 q...

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 an...

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 er...

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...

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...