4. Social Mapping

Self-confessed map addict Mike Parker explores modern cartography.

There's no more effective way of representing our lives than a map: social and political conditions, health trends and the movements of goods and ideas have far greater impact when they're plotted in multicoloured cartography.

Mike asks how society is now being analysed online in cartographic mash-ups and crowd-sourced data.

He also discovers how mapping the human condition, its needs and habits, its highs and its lows, goes back to way before the digital age.

Producer: Jeremy Grange

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2010.