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Aleks Krotoski explores how what we do online can give us a glimpse of a better world and how we repurpose the tools we have around us to make it a reality.

There's nothing more human that adapting a tool to make your life better, it's the rationale behind every innovation. Aleks Krotoski explores how our digital tools can be reinvented in powerful ways by individuals seeking a better life. Whether it's how smuggled USB sticks filled with content from the outside world inspire North Koreans to defect to the south, or the way a single photo of woman running with her hair flowing inspires a campaign against compulsory Islamic dress in Iran. What ties these stories together is hope. And it's the hope that the world can be made better that makes us look to the tools we have and how they might be re-purposed to make that a reality.

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30 minutes

Last on

Thu 12 Apr 2018 23:30
ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

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Masih Alinejad

Masih Alinejad
Masoumeh "Masih" Alinejad-Ghomi is an Iranian journalist, author of Hair’ and the founder of - an online movement where women from Iran post photos of themselves without their headscarves to protest against the restrictions enforced in Iran.
She tells us how and why she came to found the group, and how online protest allowed isolated people to find one another and grow in strength in a way that would not be possible to do if they simply took to the streets.

Bart Cammaerts

Bart Cammaerts
Β is Associate Professor in the Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.
He discusses the means by which technologies get taken up by individuals to express resistance or dissatisfaction, but that the effects and trajectory of social change is unpredictable.

Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi
is the Director of Research and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute and author of β€˜The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality’. He talks about the unique way we can repurpose existing technology to do things it was never designed for, and how hope and technology are completely intertwined.

Alex Gladstein

Alex Gladstein
is Chief Strategy Officer at the , a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies.
He tells us about the HRF’s project to smuggle flash drives into North Korea, and how seeing the realities of the outside world can spark hope, which can spark revolution.

Wanda Gwozdziowski

Wanda Gwozdziowski was born Helena Skomra in 1926 in Poland. When she was 14 years old, war broke out. Her father, an officer in the Polish Army was taken prisoner of war, so she and her mother were left to fend for themselves for the duration of the Nazi occupation. She joined the Underground Army as a radio girl, intercepting messages transmitted from the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ into occupied Poland, and passing them to her contacts. Her codename was The Crow. Now 92, she lives in California, where she resettled with her family after living her post-war years in Preston.

Nari

Nari is a defector from North Korea, now living in South Korea. She shares her experience of viewing forbidden media using flash drives that had been smuggled into the country, and how glimpses of the outside world gave her the hope needed to escape.

Broadcasts

  • Mon 19 Feb 2018 16:30
    ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
  • Thu 12 Apr 2018 23:30
    ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

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