OU on the BBC: Digital Planet: Learning Zone - Cybertalk

Synopsis

We move in the midst of a digital age which is changing the way we talk. We expect new technologies to connect us across ever greater distances, to relay data with ever increasing speed. We've been sold something called the information age, but all we really want to do is talk.

For thousands of years we've stopped to talk - on the corner of a street, across a garden fence, round a camp fire. Where we talk and who we talk to defines our community and who we are within it. But suddenly the way we talk is changing who we are - and we don't know how.

In 1997, a leafy street in North London was made the heart of an experiment. For the first time in the world the American software giant Microsoft gave away a stack of computers and switched a whole street on line. The technology has exploded communities - the street, dubbed MSN Street by its sponsor could be a prototype for all of us. But do we want the new connections, the new speed, and the new communities it opens up?

On the rural Western Isles of Scotland communication technology is being used to keep traditional communities together. Children attend tiny primary schools with often just one teacher. They only used to be able to access specialist teaching for drama, music, and art, occasionally, but now teaching is only a phone-call away - classrooms are joined by computer screens.

Perhaps surprisingly the dash for speed and connectivity isn't new - it all began over a hundred years ago with the invention of the telegraph. Then the telephone came along. We're in the telegraphic age of the internet today, waiting for the invention to come along that will make the internet as big a force in society as the telephone is today.

But if we took time to stop our rush to talk we might wonder why we ever learnt to talk at all. It turns out that the dreams of the engineers could be misleading our thirst for connectivity. Talking, it turns out, isn't about information, but about something called social grooming - a phenomenon associated with many primates. And our increasing ability to talk might not have been about helping one another understand the world, but a guard against lying.

To find out more about the Cybertalk programme, you can read the script and the contributor biographies. 

Digital Planet: Learning Zone in more depth: