The Digital Human Folgen

For decades, technologists, futurists and even our favourite science ficti has been predicting that technology will do away with the drudgery of work, take care of our basic day to day needs and create a world where scarcity will be a thing of the past.The media has been focused on the economic impact of these new tech advances, but we should be asking a different question. Who will we be in an age of plenty?

Listen to the chimes of Big Ben stiking midnight at new year, on the stroke of 12 we cheer, embrace and kiss loved ones but when did that actually happen. Well it depends on what device you're listening to. If its over the web or digital radio it could be many seconds in the past; does that matter, what happens to those seconds in between? Aleks Krotoski mediatates on our urge to converge and how the digital era can throw us in and out of sync with the universe and each other.Producer: Peter McManus

When you go online, there is a 100% chance that you will be part of an experiment. We are constantly observed, and tested upon, in the digital space, and more often than not it’s done without our knowledge or explicit consent.Many experiments are simple and narrow, focused on how to keep our eyeballs on a particular page, to how to get us to click a particular button, or how to separate people into categories where we can be subjected to particular exploitation - did your hotel or plane tickets cost more or less than another person on the same site?But should we be afraid of every test in the digital world?Aleks finds out how a glitch in the World of Warcraft resulted in the first virtual plague, and it allowed epidemiologists to study human behaviour in a pandemic situation, without risk of anyone really being harmed but in ways that were startlingly analogous to real world behaviour.And she delves into the now infamous Facebook Emotional Contagion study, and finds out that the public outrage may not only have been displaced, but could have done far more, and longer lasting, harm than could have been predicted.