The new addition to WBOI’s programming lineup explores technology through narrative storytelling and has won two National Murrow awards (among others). Airing Sundays at 4pm on WBOI, Click Here explores technology through compelling stories that help listeners understand the forces changing their lives.
Award-winning journalist and host of Click Here, Dina Temple-Raston takes listeners to unexpected places to explore how technology is reshaping, well, everything – their relationships, their jobs, the political landscape, the economy.
WBOI’s Brianna Barrow spoke with Dina Temple-Raston about how the show approaches tech with curiosity instead of fear, how she makes complex technology understandable, and why she hopes listeners tune in.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I am joined now by host of Click Here and award-winning journalist Dina Temple-Raston. Dina, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dina Temple-Raston: Thanks for having me, Bri.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, you've spent your career explaining very complex issues regarding technology. What made you want to create a show that tackles surveillance and technology and disinformation in the digital age. What did you feel was missing from the conversation?
Dina Temple-Raston: Well, I think there's just sort of this sense out there. So, I haven't always been a technology reporter. I started out. I think most people know who listened to NPR, I covered terrorism for a really long time, and what was really interesting about that was that terrorists were sort of adopting a lot of technology, like you know YouTube videos, recruiting using the internet in ways that the rest of the world wasn't really doing. They caught on really really quickly, and so it was sort of a natural progression for me to start to think about technology and the way it's affecting our world.
And I think what I started to realize is that you know technology, almost like politics, has become this thing that just washes over you. That you feel like you don't have much of a stake in, or you don't have much agency to stop it from doing whatever it is it's doing. Right? So whether that's you know social media that all of a sudden is on every phone, whether it's data centers in every town, it seems like you know these are things that you actually do have agency to stop, but you just need to understand them in order to.
So, the whole animating idea behind Click Here as a radio show. Is that there are all these things that people tell you are too complicated to understand? We'll explain them. They're not that complicated, and once you understand them, then you are armed with the tools you need to make really informed decisions about.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And that's really interesting because even around here at the station, a couple people you know heard we're picking up the show and we're very excited. And they said, "Well, is this something that you need to know a lot about technology? Do you need to like be kind of a tech person to understand it?"
Dina Temple-Raston: Well, absolutely. So, what we're doing is we're actually using people, regular people, as a vehicle to explain a lot of these different subjects, so the idea is actually you don't need to be techie at all. If we wouldn't be doing our job, if you didn't need, if you needed to be techie, and think of it a little bit like Planet Money, right? So, Planet Money took something that was very complicated, which is the economy, and broke it down into component parts so you understand how you fit into it.
We're doing the same thing. We tell stories, so it's not like a chat show. It's a narrative show. We tell stories that sort of pull back the curtain on a lot of these technological issues that you've heard about, but you may not fully understand. So, whether it's a data center in Saint Cloud, Missouri, or it's a car that has essentially become like a computer on wheels. Right?
We have we talked to somebody who had a Volvo, who he got it updated because his entertainment system wasn't working. So he went to the dealership. They just plugged it into a. They said you're good to go. It's all fixed. It's updated. Right? A lot easier than how it used to be when you wanted to fix a car, and all of a sudden, he's driving down a hill in California, and his brakes give out. And it turns out that that entertainment system and his brakes were sort of together in the way the computer software worked, and by updating one, it kind of messed up the other.
So, to understand how our cars have changed, we tell you this man's story, not to frighten you, but rather to say, look, things are sort of changing under your feet, and we want to explain them to you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Wow, that is just wild, and yeah, that is kind of—my initial response is fear. But you approach these topics with a lens of curiosity instead. What inspired you to do that?
Dina Temple-Raston: Well, I think that you know maybe this goes back to my terrorism background, but instead of sort of trying to wind people up with you know this terrorist attack or that terrorist attack, what I would do is sort of like break them down so you'd understand like the young man who was behind it, what his family situation was, and I'd humanize it so it was understandable. And people used to say when they'd hear me on the radio in the morning, they were always a little bit worried because if I was on, it was probably about some sort of terrorist attack.
But they also said that they took a lot of solace in the fact that if I told you this is not an attack you have to worry about, and this is an attack that you kind of need to worry about, they it allowed them to sort of place it in their own lives, and that's kind of what we're doing with tech as well. You know, surveillance tech. What parts of surveillance tech do you really need to worry about? What are they really watching? What are the rules behind what they're watching?
We're working on a show now about the street, just the regular old street, and how it. Technology has completely changed it from flock to Waymo, Flock cameras to Waymo cars to you know even the Ray-Ban glasses you have now that are smart glasses. So what does it mean to be out on the street today? It used to be that you had anonymity. Now maybe you don't, and that really changes things.
So, we're trying to give people a new way to think about technology and the way it's affecting their lives. The tagline in the actual show is a show about how technology is changing everything, and we thought maybe that was too broad, but so far, it hasn't been. We keep finding other things that technology is affecting.
A lot of technology gets changed by people you wouldn't expect. So, for example, you know the Google glasses or the Meta glasses that we're seeing now. It turns out one of the big uses for them is for people who are low visibility, don't have great sight. Now, people who can't see very well end up having to put like their nose up against the computer screen and enlarging it as much as they can to try to read. Now they can wear those glasses and just use a gesture with their fingers and make it work. And it's a completely revolutionary idea for what they wanted to do with these glasses. And I, you may have seen recently there have been some ads from Meta that donating a bunch of these glasses to veterans who are blind, and it wasn't what they intended to do with the technology in the first place.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Wow, and that's—you've noted in the show that technology is a double-edged sword. That's a really great example of how Click Here is capturing an example of tech that can be you know have some incredible perks like what you just mentioned, but also some peril as well.
What is one of the hardest parts about covering these stories when, you know, the technology may be just invisible or really hard to understand, or maybe like deliberately designed to deceive you? How do you cover these issues and these stories when it's always changing?
Dina Temple-Raston: We have an incredible reporting team, and you know we actually work on these shows pretty far out, and we're always looking for the perfect person to explain it. Right? There are lots of very techy people who can say things in techy ways. There are lots of tech podcasts out there that you understand maybe 30 or 40% of what they're saying.
So, what we do is we the whole team just is always looking for the person who has the metaphor or has the way to explain it that gets it just right. And you know the great thing about reporting, and you know this too, is that you never know it all. What you're really always doing is learning, so we're learning with the audience. Now, I didn't realize that the entertainment system in a car could be connected to the affecting the brake system. We learn that by calling around and finding it.
So, what we're doing is we're doing good old-fashioned journalism, but we're we've kind of made it a beat, right? And the beat is the tech that is affecting everything in your lives, and we're going to explain it to you, so you don't need to worry about it.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And how do you stay grounded while doing this work? Is there anything that ever kind of makes you panic?
Dina Temple-Raston: No, I was a counterterrorism correspondent. What could possibly make me panic? No, I don't. I don't think so. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to tech that it's scary, but that was sort of the knee-jerk reaction to terrorism too. And once you sort of took it all apart and took a look at the component pieces of it, it wasn't so scary. You understood how you could step in and stop things, right?
So, let's take data centers as an example. There's a sense that you know they're this tidal wave and force that you have no ability to stop. It's not true. Like one of the really interesting things that they're doing with data centers now to stop them is kind of ingenious. It's you know you need the power, so a lot of these companies are building their own power plants, but you also need water.
So, what they do is, and local communities who feel like they're being steamrolled by some of these companies are actually making it difficult for the companies to get water. The permitting is not being permitted. It's kind of genius, right? Because the companies can't make water. Yeah, they can make electricity, but they can't make water. And so, it's kind of these ingenious things that we love so much, and we discover them in our reporting, and we want to share them with the audience.
So, what we're trying to do is give you the tools, arm you with the tools that you need as a listener, not as a techie person, but just as a regular person in the world. We'll arm you with the information you need to make the informed decisions about whether you want to opt into this tech or opt out.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Our job is to serve Northeast Indiana and our listeners here. And when we were looking at our programming lineup, we were like, okay, we don't have a show about tech. We don't have anything dedicated to technology, and it's not an abstract thing here anymore. It's...data centers here are big issues, not just here in Fort Wayne, but like statewide. I believe they're starting to call Indiana "Data Center Alley." You know, our city just voted to end our contract with Flock. We had some storms a couple weeks ago and the power grid up in Gary failed, two weeks without power. So, these are very much.
Dina Temple-Raston: I saw that.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, challenges that are our listeners are living with, you know, they're not a distant headline or anything. They're very much up up in our faces, and so not having a show about tech, we felt like was a failure on our part and how we're serving our listeners.
And so, adding click here is kind of our way of correcting that. So now we can give our listeners, you know, a trusted, thoughtful place where they can explore this this digital world with curiosity rather than fear. So, if you could suggest one episode for a first-time listener here in Northeast Indiana, is there a certain episode that comes to mind that you would recommend?
Dina Temple-Raston: We have a show coming up about deepfakes and how you really get at the truth. We have a show coming up about kids in tech. We have a show about education in tech. We actually have a really cool show coming up about how tech is changing our relationship with nature.
So, tech is helping us see fires faster, right? Tech is helping us understand the climate better, not just you know for scientists, but more broadly. They now have cameras that, in Utah, were spotting the first wisps of smoke for a fire and allowed people to go and put it out right away before it became something worse.
So, tech isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes it's a really good thing, and we look at it from all those sides. And I think what I would say is, I hope people will, even if you don't think you like tech, we think will convert you.
If you listen to our shows and listen to our stories, we promise that you'll walk away knowing something you didn't know before, and able to say something to someone at dinner that said, "I heard this cool story on click here, and it's, it's sticky. It's stories about great people that you'll remember.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today, Dina. I really appreciate it.
Dina Temple-Raston: Thanks, Bri. Bye. Nice to meet you. Take care.
Click Here joins WBOI's weekend programming lineup, airing Sundays at 4pm. Ahead of it, listeners can catch Reveal on Sundays at 3pm. On The Media remains part of the rotation as well, airing Saturdays at 7am and again overnight on Tuesdays.
