#13 Transparent Life

The Future Human Podcast is back with Transparent Life, which explores how data visualisation tools are changing the way we understand both ourselves and our environment.

The boundaries between virtual and physical existence are increasingly blurred – as Facebook attempts to digitise our life history in social media and CCTV cameras connect to facial recognition databases, the relationship between our private selves and our public selves is changing. Like it or not, life is becoming more transparent.

Facebook is only the beginning though. Whether it’s wearable technology that ‘augments reality’ to aid our daily routine, identity search engines that track an individual’s net worth, or data-rich and geolocated ‘personae’ that follow us around like ghosts, new technologies are imposing a ‘data layer’ upon our living environment, and creating a new digital medium for human experience in the process.

Will privacy become an outmoded concept? To what extent will the post-industrial milieu become a canvas for human creativity? And are we psychologically prepared for a world in which our every interaction is recorded in public space?

To answer these questions, Future Human's Jack Gwilym Roberts and Ben Beaumont-Thomas headed to Brighton, and the headquarters of Digicave, a company that is leading the way in bringing physical experiences into the virtual space (and vice versa). We discuss their work with their CEO, Callum Rex Reid, and get input from Keiichi Matsuda, a filmmaker and designer whose work imagines futures where data is suspended all around us.

Find out more about innovation in an age of radical change at www.futurehuman.co.uk.
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