Who I am
I’ve been covering tech and society since 1999, when I first landed a role as a presenter on UK Channel 4’s late night games review series Bits (Ideal World Productions, 1999-2001). Bits is a thing that many people of a certain age remember me by; it’s what I get pestered the most about on social media, and in pubs after a certain number of drinks have been consumed - a quarter of a century after our last series of eight. My tween recently watched an episode with me and said, “OMG, that’s so early YouTube.” In fact, we were ahead YouTube: early influencers as the Web was coming up (before it went down), all brash girl power and silly sketches and fake blood. I describe it as The Monkees, but with tight t-shirts. It was the ‘90s, and I am so proud of the intensity that we wrote and covered this emerging medium in the era of the PlayStation (just released) and PlayStation 2, the Sega Dreamacst (still what I believe is the most innovative games console of all time) and the Nintendo N64 and the GameCube. I like to think that we helped bring computer gaming into the modern era.
But TV was never truly my medium; I always wanted something more. So after working on the last several series of the show as Assistant Producer, and graduating to another Channel 4 late night series (though slightly earlier) called Thumb Bandits made by the same production team (Ideal World, 2001-2002), I turned to the academy for self-actualisation, and got a MSc and a PhD in Social Psychology.
My academic chops were laser-focussed: I was interested in how the internet and the web served as a continuation of meatspace - our lives offline. This was 2003-2009, after the bubble burst and as social media turned everything into user-generated content. I wanted to know how innovations diffused through online social networks. I had an inkling I was ahead of the curve, but there were few academics interested. I recall having to convince my department to put my experimental protocol through an ethics committee. There wasn’t yet a sense that what happened online truly and psychologically affected what happened offline.
At the same time, I was grateful to The Guardian’s nascent Online section for recognising that there was a market for my interests. I was one of three contributors to the second blog on the site - the Gamesblog - and wrote a column for the paper (at the time, still considered superior to online). After a while, it became obvious that I wasn’t interested in Metal Gear Solid; the topics of my blogposts tended towards the communities that formed around wonderfully weird online behaviours. I was obsessed with subcultures and how they worked: who was the top dog? Who was the young usurper? Who was the interloper, and how did the group kick them out, or bring them in?
What prompted me to get into this line of work? Well, back in 2001, around the time I was looking for a change, I assigned one of my Bits co-presenters a game called Asheron’s Call, a sprawling, massively multiplayer online world. I had expected her to come back with stories of geeks with few social skills. When she turned up for recording with the opposite - talking about the ways people helped each other and showed kindness and genuine welcoming - I was intrigued. I started digging into these virtual social worlds and discovered a few researchers like myself who were studying the economics and the politics and the justice systems that players formed that taught life skills and self-awareness in a safe, supportive space. I learned about how online and offline lives were intertwined, and not just emotionally. These were the new golf clubs, networking opportunities for a whole generation of the next tech elite. They were where parents who were separated from their kids could bond over sword fights against virtual enemies. Years before social media taught everyone that it was possible to have communities that weren’t based in physical space, I discovered a whole new, thrilling world where all of human nonsense played out. It didn’t need to: this was a virtual, disembodied world. But it did. So what did that say about who we are, and what we could learn by looking at what we did online?
That was my entrance to the rabbit hole.
As I was contemplating leaving television, a friend who’s job it was to make television told me I was absolutely making the right decision to go into academia. She predicted that in five years’ time, I’d end up back in front of the cameras, guiding people through this new online world. And she was right. I spent five years studying how we present ourselves online, and how we influence each other through online networks, and in 2009 I got a phone call from the BBC.
They wanted me to front Virtual Revolution, a landmark four-part science TV series made with the support of the Open University that documented the social, economic, political, and psychological effects of the first 25 years of the World Wide Web. I filmed it between submitting my thesis and sitting my viva, and in that moment, not only did I travel to Ghana with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and interview Al Gore, and Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos, and John Perry Barlow, and so many inventors of the Web, I also interviewed all the researchers I referenced in my PhD. So when I eventually defended my work, I had the unbelievable privilege to know that what I had written was exactly what my sources had meant. Virtual Revolution was not only the first TV show in the world to have a twitter hashtag, it also won both an Emmy and a BAFTA for its groundbreaking and prescient online vision.
I then graduated to BBC Radio 4, where I continued to unpick the implications of the web over twelve years, thirty-eight series, and almost two hundred episodes of The Digital Human. With the talented team at BBC Scotland, we created documentaries about every possible topic you could think of: altruism, ethics, friendship, AI companionship, death, birth... I describe it as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet. Everything you could ever possibly need to know about who we are as human beings, by looking at who we are online.
Along the way, I wrote a book called Untangling the Web: What the Internet Is Doing To You based on my PhD thesis, Virtual Revolution, the early days of Digital Human, and a column I wrote for The Observer. I wrote for many publications, from Nature to Political Quarterly, had columns in several others, from the FT’s House and Home to BBC’s Science Focus, and started my own audio production company in 2015, Pillowfort Productions, to tell human stories about technology in a way that demystifies it. The aim of series like BBC Radio 4’s Male Order, about the online fertility marketplace (inspired by my involvement as a co-researcher of the ESRC-funded Online Sperm Donation Project), and BBC Radio 4’s The Immortals, about how the Silicon Valley billionaires’ personal wellness journey has become a global political project, is to give everyday people the power to witness the imbalances and the language to make change happen. I am currently working on two investigations that demystify other large-scale institutions: the global financial system (extending my work on Tortoise Media’s Real Money) and the miracle business.
I have held visiting fellowships at the British Library, the London School of Economics, and the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College, University of Oxford. I was humbled to receive an honourary doctorate from the Open University in 2018. I am a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society and a Fellow of the RSA.
I currently teach a course called Messy Humans on NYU’s ITP MA programme about how to design technology for delight, grace, glamour, psychological safety, nostalgia, serendipity, and other irreducible human qualities.
I’ve also had the opportunity to do some truly marvellous and random creative projects, some of which have been graciously supported by organisations like Google, the Nominet Trust, the Australian State of Victoria, and the British Sociological Society.
My next book, The Immortalists; The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life is out October 23rd 2025.
