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.
Folgen von The Digital Human
181 Folgen
-
Folge vom 02.05.2016Lost and Found
-
Folge vom 25.04.2016WayfindingAleks 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 Tristan Gooley's passion. As the Natural Navigator he uses anything natural or man made not only to find out where he is but where he's going. He eschews all navigational tools; maps compasses as well as digital devices in the belief that the head down follow the dot mentality they foster impoverishes our experience of the journey itself. Thora Tenbrink from Bangor University explains why the directions we receive from our devices often feel so alien that we really have to focus to make sense of them. While tech can use street names and exact distances, humans are vague navigators heading in the general direction and using landmarks. The two approaches aren't always that compatible. Our natural way-finding abilities can let us down though when we're under stress. Professor David Canter has been studying behaviour in emergency evacuations for much of his career, he explains the sometimes odd and contradictory things we resort to when trying to escape a disaster. So should we look to technology to come to the rescue? We hear from researchers at Georgia tech who explored how far participants would trust a robot to save them from a burning building - apparently quite a lot! Producer: Peter McManus.
-
Folge vom 18.04.2016TasteFood 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 well as exploring new tech that may change the way we eat - from 3D printed delights, to Chef Watson who creates recipes in the cloud, and even how we might manipulate our brains to change how we perceive flavour.Producer: Elizabeth Ann Duffy.
-
Folge vom 11.04.2016HomeIn 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 with the physical.In contrast Josh Surtees was able to create a digital space that he could call home. Josh moved to Trinidad to work as a journalist. He fell in love and when his girlfriend moved to London after two months they created a virtual home through skype and successfully continued their relationship.In Downtown LA Aleks meets Elvina Beck a digital nomad who has started a company allowing millennials to rent a communal pod with wifi access that they can make home. For her home is mobile, as long as there is online access, home can be anywhere.Architect Sam Jacobs understands the important link between home and identity. He argues that the division between the private realm iof home and the public realm is breaking down because people are exposing their identities online. Home is now one of the places that you can in fact broadcast your identity to a much wider audience.Travel writer Pico Iyer realised when he saw his home in California burn to the ground that home is not about bricks or mortar or access to wifi but should be found within ourselves.The idea of the 21st entury house, is not actually that old so will digital technologies change how and were we decide to live in the future.Produced by Kate Bissell.