If you’re in the UK and were planning on staying in tomorrow evening to watch another enthralling episode of Fern & Phil’s All Star Mr & Mrs…. may I politely interject and point out that here is another option…

This Saturday sees the start of a four-part series on BBC2 called The Virtual Revolution, presented by Dr  (yes, the ink’s still drying on her brand new Social Psychology PhD) Aleks Krotoski.  Twenty years on from the invention of the Internet Web Aleks explores 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.

According to the programme’s BBC Homepage:

“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 Krotoski 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.”

I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to this series for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I think it’s probably the first time that a documentary takes such a detailed looks at the full extent to which the world’s new digital landscape is shaping the very essence of who we are and how we relate to each other. In particular, the last programme in the series will hopefully ask the big questions about the future of humanity in an always-on-digitaly-connected society.

Alek Krotoski’s involvement as both an academic and journalist fuses together the worlds of technology and social interaction to give us her unique take on the way information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. You may already be familiar with Alek’s column in The Guardian and the brilliant Tech Weekly podcast which she heads up with input from some of her Guardian colleagues. In fact this week’s podcast sees the tables turn on host Aleks when she is herself interviewed about the forthcoming BBC series.

Listeners of the podcast and readers of Alek’s work will attest to the fact that she is a passionate geek. The type of geek that gives geeks a good name. She’s funny, chatty, extremely knowledgeable but never in an overbearing way.  Gamers will also be familiar with Aleks as a co-presenter of the computer games programmes Bits and Thumb Bandits (with Iain Lee) for Channel 4 between 1999-2002 but since then she has been busy building her profile as a serious gaming sociologist and focusing on print journalism and research papers for the games industry.

I look forward to seeing how the series develops and is received by the public.  In particular, I’m looking forward to hearing from some of the big name of the web including Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, and the inventor of the web himself, Tim Berners Lee. All of these names have made the Internet into the ‘thing’ it is today, so gaining access to them all is definitely a major coup for the Beeb.

[click here if you cannot view the embedded clip above]

One of the most interesting aspects of the series is that very concept of The Virtual Revolution was an open and collaborative production, which encouraged the web audience to help shape the series (including the title and content). For a full list of all those who contributed towards the content of this series, click here.

For each programme, you can explore the debates around programme themes, watch and comment on interview and graphics clips, and download clips for personal use and re-editing. The series website is really comprehensive and serious geeks (or curious Georges among us) will be able to lose themselves in the rich content (photos, videos, blog posts) provided to accompany the programme.

The series begins on Saturday 30 January, BBC2 – 8.30pm:

Programme 1: The great levelling?

The wonder and walls of Wikipedia; the blogger media revolution; the price of peer-to-peer piracy… who really has power on the web? Is it the online crowd or the ‘gatekeepers’? Is the web a platform for sharing or is it inequality writ large?

Programme 2: Enemy of the state?

Is the web indestructable or can censorship, cybercrime or infrastructure attack bring it down? As the web trancends the barriers of the physical world the orthodox view is that the nation state will inevitably wither as the porous web of hyperlinks conquers the globe. But some states are fighting back.

Programme 3: the cost of free

Free services, limitless information, endless opportunities for the user… the web seems to defy all the laws of economics. But are we trading our privacy for a ‘free’ web?

Programme 4: Homo Interneticus?

Are we empowered, connected and enlightened with the world’s knowledge at our fingertips? Or distracted and addicted with shorter attention spans> Are our skittering brains bombarded and stupified by the ‘yuck and wow’ of the web? Is the web really changing us – the way we think, the way we behave, the way relate to each other? And is it for better or for worse?