91Èȱ¬

So far in The Virtual Revolution, we've looked at the impact of the web on power, international politics, and business. Now, in the final episode of the series, we're focussing on us. Is the web, with its instant connections and access to information, having an impact on our relationships and possibly even the way we think?

'Generation Web'Ìý - the generation who have grown up knowing only a wired world - will enter adulthood having spent 10,000 hours online. On the programme you'll see neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, expressing concerns that the impact on their brains has been underestimated - a point she made back when production launched. But author Charles Leadbeater, who has advised the government about the web's impact on economics and education, thinks that such fears are the expression of an age-old problem - one generation finding it hard to comprehend what the next is doing.Ìý "I think a lot of this is a kind of middle class, middle aged panic about the web", he says. "They are panicked by the future [and] panicked by what they think their children are doing."

There are plenty of anecdotes - but surprisingly little hard evidence on this subject. Which is why in the making of The Virtual Revolution, we were so keen to join forces with Professor David Nicolas, head of the CIBER research group at University College London.

Today we've launched the Web Behaviour Test, devised with Professor Nicholas and with Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University (who investigates multitasking behaviour). We've identified eight web 'species' that have evolved over the past twenty years. Taking the test will tell you what sort of web animal you are, and help contribute to an experiment which should show if people who use the web a lot, think differently from people who don't.

The experiment will run for several months, and the results will be reported back in the summer of 2010. But during the filming of The Virtual Revolution, we ran a small scale trial. Just over one hundred people of different ages and genders took the test - some who use the web rarely, others who use it all the time. The results were suggestive. Generation Web answered their questions after looking at half the number of web pages and only spending one sixth of the time viewing the information than their elders did.

Hopefully our full experiment will find out more.

So what do you think? Are you worried about the impact of the web on your relationships, identity and even the way you think? Or do you agree with Charles Leadbeater, that this is just an ill-informed moral panic? Let us know in the comments below.

The third episode of Virtual Revolution is called The Cost of Free - and it's not as oxymoronic as you think. The Cost of Free examines the trades made online by users of the web as they share their thoughts, their preferences, their curiosities and their desires with the many , services and media which appear to be delivering information online for free.

Virtual Revolution Episode Two - Enemy of the State? will transmit on 91Èȱ¬ Two - Saturday 6 February 2010.

Most of the content produced during the open source production process: blogs, rushes, research links, can be found through the main episode page for programme two: Enemy of the State?.

1 - Twitter challenges Iran, Tehran, June 2009

During the production Aleks Krotoski blogged about the challenges the web posed to the traditional notions of the nation state, and you can watch the rushes of our interview with Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

Building around the argument of the web's challenge to governments is Bill Thompson, who spoke eloquently of the web's potential at the Web at 20 launch event in July 2009:

Worth noting is that Andrew Keen strongly disagrees with such ideas.

2 - The internet and its history with (D)Arpanet - we have more rushes of the father of the internet, Vint Cerf, speaking to Virtual Revolution; we also spent some time trying to track down .

The visit to the main .com servers at VeriSign might pique your interest in a story/urban legend we found ourselves intrigued by during the production - that of the mysterious 14th Server.

Re Wikileaks: we have rushes from Daniel Schmitt's interview available on our site. Further info of interest is that while by a US Court ruling (but opened again shortly afterwards), Wikileaks has recently succumbed to the pressures, not of law, but of finance, and .

Mitch Kapoor introducesÌýJohn Gilmour's famous quote that the - an interesting concept made famous as .

China and the web raises a number of fascinating issues in the series, and anyone wishing to delve deeper into the topic, the rushes interviews of Xiao Qiang (describing ) and Professor Ross AndersonÌý are essential viewing.

Ross Anderson's rushes also provide an excellent counterpoint to the matters discussed in President of Estonia's, Toomas Ilves' rushes clip, wherein he describes the .

That's just a few of the links we should have shared during the programme. All this info and much more debate around the series - including concepts which we were considering, but never actually made the final script (so dissuaded were we by the responses from users and other bloggers), such as the notion that eBay was an emerging eNation in its own right - all are available through our site.

So... Over to you. What do you think about the internet and web's threat or support to governments and nations?

The 3D Documentary Explorer is an experiment in interactive storytelling - a mix of video clips from the series, and web pages relevant to each clip, packaged into one experience.

We've cut the first two 60 minute episodes of The Virtual Revolution into a series of short chapters, so that the whole video experience is around 20 minutes for each episode. If you want, you can sit back and watch those straight through. But if the story we're telling sparks your curiosity and makes you want to sit forward and find out more, you can pause the video and use the web sites that we've identified around each chapter as a starting point for your own journey around the web. (Watch the video above for a 'how to' guide)

The Explorer is based on a concept first prototyped inside the 91Èȱ¬ two years ago, but it is still version 1.0. So please do give it a test drive. Any feedback on your experience, suggestions for improvements, or thoughts about this approach to storytelling would be very welcome.

The wait is over. The Virtual Revolution aired on 91Èȱ¬ Two Saturday 30 January 2010, and can be watched on iPlayer for the next seven days (of which, more later!).