Episode 4

Available for over a year

Dr Aleks Krotoski concludes her investigation into how the world wide web is transforming our lives by looking at its effect on us, and how it is changing the way we think and relate. In the last five years we have witnessed the meteoric rise of social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Now Aleks explores what impact this new way of connecting humanity has on the younger generation, for whom it is becoming second nature. The film features exclusive interviews with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as the inventor of the web himself, Tim Berners-Lee. The essence of the web is in linking data, and for some this liberates their minds because they can now leap from subject to subject in the vast virtual library. Yet critics worry that this very quality may in fact be making us more distracted. Aleks puts these competing ideas to the test in a pioneering experiment to find out if the web is rewiring our brains.