The Digital Human

Imagine being able to fix a malfunction in your body with a programmable smart device implanted deep inside your body… The device senses, monitors and responds to your condition in real time and provides updates and analysis on your phone.

In the past few years, we’ve seen a boom in health apps and wearable smart devices offering personalised and real time analysis of our daily lives. It’s one thing putting on a wearable smart device - but what does it take to trust one implanted inside your body?

From continuous glucose monitoring for diabetics to invasive surgery implanting electrodes on the spinal cord or in the brain, Aleks Krotoski asks how a closer relationship with implanted health technology can affect our trust; from our faith in device functionality, security, and longevity, to our trust of ourselves, be it our agency, identity and intuition to read our own bodies.

Produced by Jac Phillimore

Aleks was once asked by a friend to track down an invisible man - a character with no digital footprint at all. How does someone not exist in this media-saturated moment, and why does that make it seem like he has something to hide?

Find the right balance between personal privacy and personal transparency, Aleks speaks with information security professionals who hunt for bad guys by puzzling together the pieces of leaked databases and hacked accounts, digital analysts who peer into our devices to catch us out when we’re acting out of character, and undercover operatives who build believable online legends to slip unnoticed into the daily life of the internet. As we grapple with what it means to be able to edit our personal histories in an age when every moment of our lives is expected to be available at the click of a button, how do we demonstrate that beyond a shadow of a doubt, a fake person is real?

In this episode, Aleks stumbles over the line between fiction and reality to see what the people scrubbing themselves clean and the people fabricating entirely new personas can tell us about what we expect a human being to be.

Aleks Krotoski explores whether disinhibition, often associated with toxic online behaviours such as trolling, may also have benefits in our digital world?

Since the early days of the internet, research into disinhibition, including John Suler’s much-cited paper on the ‘online disinhibition effect’ has recognised that benign disinhibition not only exists alongside toxic but deserves equal consideration. Yet somehow, our fascination with the negative often drowns out more nuanced perspectives. In this episode of the Digital Human, Aleks investigates scenarios where disinhibition might be helpful, examines factors which positively facilitate it and asks whether assumptions that aggressive online behaviours are a result of disinhibition might be a misdiagnosis of the problem.

Producer: Lynsey Moyes

Contributor Biographies:

Ani de la Prida is a psychotherapist and creative arts counsellor and teaches at the University of East London, where she did her master's degree research on the use of digital media in arts therapy. Ani also the founder and course director of the Association for Person-Centred Creative Arts.

Tom Postmes is professor of Social Psychology at the University of Groningen. He completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. In his research Postmes shows how everyday interactions can lead to such collective behaviour.

Judith Donath is a writer, designer and artist whose work examines how new technologies transform the social world. Author of The Social Machine (MIT Press, 2014), she is currently writing a book about technology, trust and deception.

Caitlin McGrane is a feminist activist, researcher and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. She works for Gender Equity Victoria leading a project enhancing online safety for women working in the media.

Catherine Renton is a freelance writer and culture reviewer based in Edinburgh.

Humans are special creatures, in part because of our relationship with out technology. Our brains are not purely biological, we actually think through our tools. Over centuries, things like the telescope have allowed us to view and understand the secrets of the universe, film and computation has allowed us to manipulate time to see hidden patterns of the world, Augmented and Virtual Reality is allowing us to shape our perception of the world, and Machine Learning could open up boundless untapped knowledge we’ve never been able to process.

But in the digital age, the rate of change is happening so quickly, we don’t notice it day to day. We’re so busy we don’t stop to examine, or appreciate, how technology might change the paradigm of the world we all live in.

In this episode, Aleks explores some of the technology that has radically changed how humans experience the universe, and learns how we can prepare to adapt to the next technologies that could forever change the world.

Producer Elizabeth Ann Duffy, Researcher Juliet Conway, Engineer, Malcolm Torrie.

Aleks discovers how the digital world has reshaped social class and the rights of workers, and finds out how those workers are using lessons of the past to redress the balance of power in a world where the giant companies are have grown to be more powerful than nation states.

The internet began as an academic tool, made to share information, bring people together and spur on advances that would benefit humans across the world. When it was shared with the masses, the dream was that with enough shared information, enough connection from human to human, we would be able to put aside differences, solve global problems, and prosper more as a species.

That didn’t happen.

Over the the ten years of Digital Human, we have observed communities sharing harmless, odd beliefs and tongue-in-cheek hoaxes for fun, not realising the same technology would be used to share the kind of malignant lies and trolling that has lead to persecution, murder, and even the storming of the US Capitol.

Somewhere along the way, the digital world was flipped on its head, with the giants of social media acting as a hub of misinformation, strife and simmering hostility across political and cultural divides. In hindsight, many people were shocked that so many people would use the technology in ways that went against its original purpose… but it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Aleks explores how similar reversals have happened with technology from the time we began to explore mass communication, what lessons we should have learned from the earliest days of online communities, and how as more mature and alert consumers of the internet, we could still make things better.

Aleks Krotoski explores what it means to be solitary in our digital world and whether we should be more nuanced in our approach to the complex human emotion of loneliness.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Digital Human, we’ve been reflecting on some of the questions that have stuck with us over the years. When 'Isolation' aired in 2013, the phrase 'loneliness epidemic' often appeared in the press with digital technology regarded as a key culprit in increasing isolation. Aleks interrogated this idea, exploring ways in which technology might facilitate as well as disrupt connection, speaking to inventor Joanna Montgomery whose prototype project 'Pillow Talk' had become an internet sensation.

Things shifted during lockdown when enforced separation from loved ones and, conversely, a lack of personal space, effectively mainstreamed loneliness, with technology reframed as an important tool in keeping us connected. In this follow-up programme Aleks wonders what insights the pandemic revealed about loneliness and how we might future-proof ourselves against it? She finds out what happened next for Joanna Montgomery and talks to writer and historian Fay Bound Alberti who suggests that there is a distinction between transitory and chronic loneliness. 'Wellbeing smuggler' Antony Malmo talks about how the language we use around loneliness can be counter-productive whilst Maff Potts of the Camerados movement explains how setting up 'public living rooms' can remove stigma and encourage community connections.

Produced by Lynsey Moyes in Edinburgh.

Contributors:

Joanna Montgomery is an interaction designer, founder of technology company, Little Riot and the creative mind behind the internet phenomenon "Pillow Talk”. Her work explores how humans engage with technology and the impact it has on society.

Antony Malmo, Director of Change and Capability at Allos Australia describes himself as a ‘wellbeing smuggler’ and ‘jargon cutter’ and is an accomplished educator across the fields of management, finance, health, engineering and manufacturing.

Fay Bound Alberti is a writer, historian and consultant. She is UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Professor in Modern History at the University of York. Her books include This Mortal Coil (2016) and A Biography of Loneliness (2020).

Maff Potts is founder of the Camerados movement which believes that the simple human act of looking after each other can be transformative. https://www.camerados.org/

Aleks Krotoski asks if we've all become techno-fundamentalists, unquestioningly accepting the latest innovation into our lives without thinking about potential downsides.

Perhaps we could learn from a society who think much more carefully and critically about adopting new technology - the Amish. Unlike what many people believe, it's not that they reject technology outright but they make careful community based decisions about they what they permit. It's a thoughtful, democratic and yes scientific approach. They'll see how a modern innovation effects the community by allowing it to be trialled and if they don’t like what they see, they reject it,

How many of the negative unintended consequences of digital technology could have been avoided if the rest of us took a page out of their book?

Economics has always been complicated, but the day to day stuff was always pretty straightforward. Make money from working, exchange that money for goods and services, save a bit for a rainy day if possible.

The online world changed things. Not so long ago, people were afraid to give their banking details to eBay, now people trade in currencies they will never hold in their hands, and are investing in non-fungible tokens.

NFTs, put simply, are items that are unique and can’t be replaced with something else. In comparison, a coin would be seen as fungible - traded one penny for another and you still have something worth a penny. NFTs can be traded for different NFTs - like trading cards - or eventually sold off for cash when the owner thinks they can get the best price.

Until recently, NFTs have been mostly made up of digital art, some music, even a Jack Dorsey Tweet, but we’re on the cusp of a new era in digital economics, one where everything could be made into a token - the likes and comments you leave on social media, the hobby you dive into on your off time, even your heart, or your mind.

Aleks finds out how the digital economy has changed so much in the last decade, and explores a future where everything - from your likes, your hobbies, even your heartbeat - could be Tokenised and up for trade.