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There’s a name for how cruel people can get given a little anonymity on the internet. It’s called “online disinhibition effect” and the resulting venom can ruin your day or worse, destroy your good name. Bob looks at the fraught relationship on the web between reputation, privacy and the law.
Is Google making us stupid? Is it making us smarter? Have we lost our ability to concentrate? Are we more social or more isolated as a result of our constantly interconnected lives? Brooke takes a look at some of the research that attempts to answer the question: how is the internet affecting our brains?
Click here for the uncut interview with Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Technology is such an integral part of our lives but will it soon be part of our bodies as well? Computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks so. He predicts that by 2045 we will have merged with our technology and that we'll be smarter, healthier and... well...immortal. Sounds implausible? Kurzweil explains that that's what people often say about his predictions until they come true.
The basic architecture of the Internet hasn't changed since it was conceived 40 years ago. But what was once the playground of wonks is now the main staging area for the global economy and open to an array of security vulnerabilities. Brooke talks with Internet experts who ponder a vexing conundrum: adjustments that increase security simultaneously hamper innovation.
CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE EXTENDED INTERVIEWS
Highlights from Past Shows
Town hall meetings across America this week erupted in raucous protests. Many on the left dismissed the protests as political astro-turfing, straight from the playbook of right wing operatives. But according to The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, the protestors' tactics are the legacy of left-wing rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky.
It was a big week for conspiracy theories, with two big rumors circulating in the news. First, that the President is secretly not American. Second, that Obama's health care proposal includes plans to euthanize senior citizens, a claim promoted by former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey. The Atlantic's James Fallows explains how these claims fare in today's 24-hour news cycle.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
