The Virtual Revolution: The Great Levelling?

Twenty years on from the invention of the world wide web, Dr Aleks Krotoski looks at how it is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives.

Joined by some of the web's biggest names - including the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and the web's inventor - she explores how far the web has lived up to its early promise.

The founding father of the web Tim Berners-Lee, believed his invention would remain an open frontier that nobody could own, and that it would take power from the few and give it to the many.

Now, in a provocative, strongly authored argument, presenter Aleks will re-assess utopian claims like these, made over many years by the digital revolution's key innovators - and test them against the hard realities of the emerging web today, exploring how the possibilities of the pure technology have been constrained, even distorted by the limitations of human nature.

In the first in this four-part series, Aleks charts the extraordinary rise of blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube, and traces an ongoing clash between the freedom the technology offers us, and our innate human desire to control and profit.

First broadcast 22nd February 2010