The Digital Human, a new Radio 4 series about technology and modern life begins next Monday, and I’m very excited to be presenting it. It will take seven broad themes of modern living – including memory, privacy, serendipity (of course) and faith – to understand how advances in technology have changed our lives.
Digital technologies have become mundane, invisible for many people. This series takes a step back from the frantic iterations of “progress” to see how far we’ve come.
Here’s the blurb:
[Aleks] asks what the deluge of images from digital photography means for memory when every second is recorded, edited and posted online for posterity; whether the identities created in social media are merely exercises in personal branding to be managed and protected like any other product; and, as traditional churches attempt to leverage technology to spread their faith, do the behaviours people display online have more in common with religion than rationality.
I’m working with a team of talented folks at BBC Scotland: David Stenhouse, Peter McManus, Victoria McArthur, Kate Bissell and Elizabeth Duffy who have been very patient with me while I’ve been hidden in the highlands of Scotland finishing (ahem) my book.
I will be tweeting about it with the hashtag #digihuman, and the official site – when it launches – will feature a remarkable archive of the content and interviews that we’ve used to create each episode.
The Digital Human broadcasts for seven weeks at 1630 from Monday 30th April.
Comments
Will Radio 4 be running a podcast feed of the show?
Just heard the digital human & thought it was great … & also had that annoying ‘’ARGHGHHHHHH that’s JUST what i’ve been thinking – why isn’t this MY show !‘’ hahaaaaa… tho i was surprised you didn’t mention W.Benjamin & the quote about not understanding a factory by seeing a picture of it …. but then you demonstrated this personally which was interesting … poignant & funny / sad / funny … terrific.
@DavidB – the podcast feed lives here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/ series/dh
@Martha – thank you :D
Thanks! And loved it. Looking forward to the next 6.
I started to post family photos, notes and articles in 1993 with the free space provided by my ISP. I then got my own domain and have made a head way into digitalising the media in my life. This includes converting all camcorder video tapes to the digital jukebox, all the home off air recordings I have made, all my vinyl and cassette tapes, all the Radio 4/4 Extra programmes I have listened to, getting digital copies of the books I have read and want to read, scanning all my photographs, postcards, slides and negatives and will eventually include scans of all my documents, letters from and to friends and family, Christmas cards, birthday cards, bank statements, bills, recites and teenage diary. Obviously I have retained all my original digital materials such as e-mails, word processing and spreadsheet documents, digital photographs and computer programs. So far I am approaching 20 terabytes of data. Why? Because I can. Because I have had a sense that one day I might forget and need to be reminded and because I have carried a camera in my pocket or hung around my neck for over 40 years – just in case I or someone with me needed it or wanted it. One big problem with the digital age is that it can all be wiped out with one computer command, where as the boxes, crates and a metric tonne of the physical material would be much harder to dispose off. Also the physical material need nothing to access most of it and certainly not advanced computing power.
Robert Oppenheimer got cold feet about working on the nuclear bomb but his colleagues went ahead and designed it anyway. They were immersed in the science and technology. This is what humans do. What if they had been working on a fragrance bomb?! Say, one that made all the soldiers think about breakfast and go home to their families?
Very thought provoking broadcasts, Aleks.
CS
thanks Chris!
Alex, despite much mythology around our abilities to take in vast amounts of information from the world around us, there is no evidence that we can absorb novel information at an information rate greater than around 20 bits per second (Yes! not Megabits or kilobits). The implications are enormous and described at great length in “Bottleneck – Our human interface with reality” www.humanbottleneck.com
Hi Richard – thanks for the heads up. Will have a look!