Digital Works Podcast

Episode 040 - Bytes #5, Ash and Katie reflect on 2023 looking at declining attention spans, AI challenges, shifts in where users are spending their time online, and some attempts at predicting priorities and trends for 2024

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In the last podcast episode of the year, Katie and Ash reflect on 2023 - picking a few of the most notable articles, podcasts, research reports, and new stories of the year.

We discuss digital overload and the impact it's had on our attention spans. Exploring whether our cultural institutions could become havens of focus and relaxation in the blizzard of digital distractions.

We look at the wild frontier of AI technology and its impact on our search engines and content creation. Considering the difficulty of distinguishing between human and algorithm-generated content, we also explore how AI could be our ally in boosting creative thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. 

Meanwhile,  social media has also undergone massive fragmentation, we discuss the fall of Twitter and the moral implications of who we engage with on these platforms. 

We also gaze into the crystal ball and try to predict what 2024 might hold for us.

We discussed:

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode, episode 40, which is also episode 5 of Bites my colleague Katie and I look back over 2023 and discuss some of the most notable news stories, articles, podcast episodes and general developments in the digital world. Enjoy. The first thing that I would like to offer for discussion is a piece in the New York Times from Ezra Klein that was published in May this year, titled Beyond the Matrix Theory of the Mind. I think this is interesting and important because it eventually drifts onto the subject of AI, but I'm always quite interested in the way in which, in a relatively small amount of time let's say the last 15 to 20- years advances in digital things, particularly the internet, particularly screen-based usage.

Speaker 1:

So everyone having a smartphone has completely broken our brains, and Ezra Klein talks quite a lot about that. He talks about digital advancement in relation to productivity and actually how you've seen a real flat lining of productivity in the last couple of decades. And he talks about how having the entire cumulative everything of human knowledge accessible through a thing in your pocket is maybe not always an entirely positive thing. And he says much of my mind was preoccupied by the constant effort needed to just hold a train of thought in a digital environment designed to distract, agitate and entertain me. And I am not alone. And he references a professor called Gloria Mark who has been doing research into attention spans and in 2004, the average time people spent on a single screen within a digital experience was two and a half minutes, and by 2012, so many, eight years later that had gone down to 75 seconds and the most recent research shows that it's down to about 47 seconds. So actually there's this degradation of people's ability to focus and be attentive. And, as Ezra says, one lesson of the digital age is that more is not always better More emails and more reports and more slacks and more tweets and more videos and more news articles and more slide decks and more zoom calls have not led, it seems, to more great ideas. And so this is what I would like to discuss, because I do think and I'm sure we'll come to talk about AI in a moment, but I do think this links to AI in a bit and there was another article I thought about sharing and maybe we'll link to it sort of envisages this dystopian future where everyone is using AI to construct incredibly long, dense emails and letters. The recipient then puts that into a large language model and asks it to be distilled down to its salient points and then uses an AI to construct a very long, dense response to that.

Speaker 1:

And it does feel like this explosion of information availability and the decline in people's attention spans is something that certainly people working in digital roles, people working in digital marketing roles, people working in digital content roles need to be mindful of, and it feels like maybe maybe I'm being utopian here but maybe cultural organisations could provide a bit of an antidote to that in some of the both on and offline experiences that they can offer. Anyway, I will stop talking there. And, Katie, what do you think? How does this resonate with you, this idea of this explosion of information and sort of disintegration of attention spans?

Speaker 2:

It's a really great article. It's so considered and it covers a lot of different strands of all of this. The issue about attention and the fracturing of our attention spans, I think, is fair and right and got worse with the advent of smartphones, has continued to get worse. Things like TikTok don't help, etc. I will say that, in the article, one of the things he talks about is how a problem with these sorts of tools, and how that affects our focus, is that people use them to create content that then you then have to like interact with somehow, so like emails or whatever, whatever, and I think that that's true.

Speaker 2:

I do think, though, that some of the issues that he talks about in that article are more to do with where we are, our familiarity with these tools. It's such early days we are collectively still feeling our way with them. How are they useful? How are they not useful?

Speaker 2:

There's another quote, which I pulled out, where she says these systems will do more to distract and entertain than to focus, and I think that's true, but also that's not really what they're for anyway.

Speaker 2:

So maybe I'm, uncharacteristically, slightly more optimistic in that. I think some of it is just we're not yet using the tools in the right way and the tools themselves are quite nascent. It takes maybe a bit more faffing around than perhaps we will in the future. But to the point about cultural organisations, yeah, I think one of the other issues for cultural organisations around resource and having to do more with less is, on the one side, these tools are brilliant, but on the other side it means if you are in a marketing type role, it's yet another thing you have to get your head around. It's yet another thing that's taking your attention away. That's not quite the question you're asking, but I think I'm saying I agree with a lot of what you're saying in this article. But I also think possibly in two, three years we'll look back on an article like that and it'll seem quite naive, which is fine because that's like where we are.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think, just on the point of cultural organisations, maybe to offer a bit of a haven in this blizzard of distraction, there was a nice article and again I'll put this in the show notes from Eric Bruce, who's the chief experience officer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and he linked to an article that his team have produced, titled how to Recharge at the National Gallery this holiday season, and it's entirely focused at basically having the most calm, chilled out, relaxing visit to the gallery possible, and I do think there is an opportunity for cultural organisations to sort of stake out that space as a bit of antidote to digital distraction.

Speaker 2:

Oh, totally, I would agree with that Full stop.

Speaker 1:

And with a Plato quote which was in the article as well. You know, just to say that this is perhaps not a entirely new or, you know, it's not a set of concerns that only come with sort of contemporary society. So Plato was very down on writing and he said if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness into their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves but by means of external marks. And I do think you know it's always nice to reference some Asian Greek philosophy. But there is always a worry that you know, the latest generation is going to the dogs and everything is crumbling in every generation throughout history. So I think that perhaps provides some solace that maybe not everything is as terrible as it seems, joy, okay, so Katie, what is our second thing?

Speaker 2:

So this thing is not a reading thing, it is a listening thing bit of a pattern here because it's also somebody from the New York Times. It is not as recline, but it is the Hard Fork podcast, which is a joint podcast by Kevin Ruse from the New York Times and KC Newton, who isn't at the New York Times. He has his own thing called platformer and he writes the Atlantic as well. So, just generally as an aside, great podcast. But the latest episode, which I do think the reason for mentioning in this context is, I think is super relevant both to this year but also to next year. The title of it is what's Next for Open AI and Binance is Binance-led and AI is eating the internet, and less focused on the first bit of that, but the AI is eating the internet thing.

Speaker 2:

There is a really super interesting part at the end of that podcast about AI and search and there's a lot of different strands to that which we won't necessarily have time to go into now, but hugely relevant, I think, for arts and cultural organisations. What essentially it comes down to is that we know already that people are using AI tools to create content for websites and getting it to write stuff for you. Whatever they talk about this example and it's quite an extreme example in the podcast of this guy who, the other week, effectively used an AI tool to completely scrape the content from another website and then build a new site using the AI generated content from that site. So that's obviously bad. We probably all agree that's bad, but the interesting thing about it was that the site that he created ended up ranking really highly in search. There is a bigger point, then, about what AI is doing to search engine results pages in terms of.

Speaker 2:

Up until now, there's always been issues around SEO and how reliable is this stuff, but we're now genuinely at stage and I think next year is going to be this could start to cause problems is are we going to see worse and less relevant search engine results? How do we know when something is returned that it's been written by human? Google and others haven't really figured out what the set of signals are that they're going to use to assess that stuff and also whether should they tag stuff or this looks like it's AI generated. So all of that really, I think is hugely important for us to think about in terms of our websites and also from an arts perspective, like content and how we might think about content in a way that is more interesting and unique and less written by an AI. There's quite a lot in there, but it's both fascinating, alarming, interesting, exciting, scary.

Speaker 1:

And I think there's another aspect to how AI could impact search, and I think that's the activation by the search engines of AI driven functionality within their search products. So, being of integrated AI for a number of months now, I wouldn't be surprised if Google were not far behind, and recent court documents have shown. Google have, for a number of years now, been trying to construct their user experiences so that users spend more time on Google products, so that Google can sell advertising against that traffic. And AI gives them the ability to much more effectively and at scale deliver the answers to search queries within the search product environment, rather than just providing links off to other websites which may answer your search query. And I think that's interesting and important for people to consider, because I would not be surprised if, as you say, through the course of next year, traffic from organic search begins to decline quite significantly as the search engines become better at answering search queries in situ, as it were.

Speaker 2:

Definitely, and in the podcast Casey Neusen talks about that taken to its extreme end. So he's sort of saying, in like five years we may have a situation where you know your search results are in terms of there will be very little, that is like here's a list of URLs that you can go to. It will be more like you're saying, the search engine itself answering it, in which case I can't remember the analogy they use, but it's like Google has, and Microsoft with you know, being in chat GBT. They both have hands in both pies. That's not an analogy. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2:

Like Google, search is everything for Google, but actually they also can work on BARD and they can make that good. So in a way, it doesn't really matter to them if one falls off as long as the other one works. But it may well matter in terms of users and in terms of the sort of quality of the stuff we get back and also from a yeah, like from an arts and culture perspective website traffic and so on lack of yeah, and just back to the first point you were making about sort of being able to demarcate between human generated and AI generated content.

Speaker 1:

There's some work being done by people like Adobe, in partnership with an organization called the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity, have proposed a new system for disclosing and sort of tagging how a piece of content was created, and the system's called content credentials, and so we may see the emergence of those sorts of new norms and protocols. And also there are things that organizations can do with you know, robotstxt files and things like that to stop, or to do as much as you can to stop large language models or scraping your site for training data in the future. There is, I would imagine, numerous court cases brewing about data that has been used to train. So far, I've seen society of authors and people like that putting together class action suits, basically, so it'll be really interesting to see how those pan out.

Speaker 2:

So this is related to a specific article. It's sort of related to like reading around the different articles and the podcast thing, but so maybe we can bring it up in a different way, but it is sort of related to what you just said as well. That's why I was just thinking, should I just say it? So historically, arts and culture organizations have always been a bit behind the curve when it comes to digital stuff. So if you go, you know like 2010, you know it was like the use of social media channels to reach and engage audiences. Arts and culture organizations were a little bit behind other sectors and then they've caught up. And I think the same will happen with AI in terms of using proprietary data to train AI's and therefore to do things more effectively, whether that's selling tickets or whatever.

Speaker 1:

Thing number three. It's an essay from Sarah Garten, stanley and OA Slytewaller, part of their series of essays that they're calling a manifesto for now, and this essay specifically looks at the question of AI and, I suppose, the existential threat that it presents in many ways, and the essay is titled AI is Faster Than you, and Then in Brackets or we can be more like the turtle and it talks about the emergence of AI you want to see it of usable AI at scale. It talks about the things that those tools are very good at. It talks about AI generated art and creative thinking, critical thinking, problem solving. There's all sorts of ways that we could have talked about AI. We've already talked about it. It has been the overarching digital conversation piece of the year.

Speaker 1:

I would say maybe Twitter's implosion is the other one, which we'll talk about in a moment, but I think for people listening to this, for people worrying about how to engage with AI, I think yes, absolutely. It is a tool and a technology unlike anything we've encountered before, and I think particularly around its rate of development, growth, the improvement of the sophistication of its ability. There is no parallel that you can draw. But what this article, what this essay looks at is how we can work with AI and actually how we can start to be more thoughtful about the tasks that will absolutely be taken up by AI and there's sort of no use clinging onto that and then the tasks for which, actually, the human mind is far better suited. And you know, they sort of draw a number of parallels, but one of which is that fire can't be undiscovered, the toothpaste is out of the tube, we're not going to be going back, and so AI is something that we need to learn to live with, it's something that we need to learn how to use in our work, and I think it's also something that we need to get good at understanding when it is not the right tool to reach for.

Speaker 1:

Because, I mean, I was talking to someone the other day who's just done some recruitment and she said you could immediately see the people who had prepared an application with chat GPT you know it was just in the syntax with the language choices. She said it was a really, really clear dividing line and more often than not, those people didn't make it through that initial screening. And I think, whilst this thing feels like magic at the moment, actually it's not at the moment great at everything. It may feel like it's a good way to write articles or produce marketing copy, but actually it still requires quite a lot of human intervention in order to make that stuff good. For me, that's the saving grace. At the moment, that sort of human creativity and a human perspective is still valuable and at the moment isn't something that this technology can replicate in the same way. But I don't know if that's am I, am I. Am I the one now being utopian and optimistic? What's your sort of perspective on that?

Speaker 2:

That's such a difficult question, isn't it? I don't think we know. We don't know what we don't know. That's the tricky thing with AI, isn't it? Lots have been written alongside that about creativity and how AI is a long, long, long way off kind of originality in terms of creativity. I truly believe that is the case.

Speaker 2:

I think to the point about people writing applications with chat, gpt and that go versions of and that being very obvious. Again, I think that's probably because we're still early stages with these tools, but it's always been the case, hasn't it, that if you're applying for a job, you have to stand out from a bunch of other people, and so it's probably still going to be the case that in order to do that, you need to yes, you need to demonstrate experience and all those things, but you need to express yourself, probably in a way that's more unique to you. So that is literally impossible at the moment for an AI to do, because it can only. You know, large language models are the sum total of kind of conversation and discourse. They're not individual voices. They don't have that individuality of even in a written form, which obviously an application is a much more formal thing, and I've no doubt as well that you know.

Speaker 2:

It's also the case with schools, universities, colleges anybody who's having to look at large chunks of text that already the people that do that are becoming a lot more savvy about what has been generated, you know, by a chat bot. And I think there are tools out there that actually you know we'll scan those things and tell you yeah, it's 80% likely that this has been created not by a human. I agree that I. I mean certainly for the foreseeable, let's say, five years. I can't imagine a scenario where things like creativity and the things that make us unique will be overridden by an AI. But again, I could be found to be very naive with that viewpoint. Who knows?

Speaker 1:

And I'll end with a quote from the essay. It says artificial intelligence for the arts. It's a bit like fire you can't leave it untended and the more you look away, the more it does stuff that you might prefer. It didn't like replace us, so why not look? And I do think you know we've got to get curious about this stuff. Ai, large language models, aren't something that we can totally ignore. I think everyone listening to this, I would encourage them to have a go with these tools, get a sense of what it is good at, get a sense of what it's less effective with, and start to at least understand the shape of this emergent technology.

Speaker 2:

One of the other things that I thought would be useful to flag is quite a recent thing, but it's very relevant for next year, which is the off-coms online nation 2023 report. So this is a UK report, as in it's reporting on the internet use of adults and children actually as well, but in the UK it's a very comprehensive study. It is very robust in its methodology and, because they've been doing it for so many years, it's really useful because obviously they can benchmark behaviorally, like what people are doing, and I think it's some. With all the talk of AI and all that kind of thing, I think it's useful for us to also consider in the near time future, so certainly the next 12 months how are people using things like social media? Has that changed? You know it's a great report. You can get it from their site.

Speaker 2:

A few things that jumped out to me was that, actually, interestingly, overall time spent on the internet is slightly down, which I thought was a bit of a surprise, but proportionately, time spent on social media is up. There's been periodically articles, commentary, observations that social media is dead or dying. There's no doubt that it's changing in how people use them, especially how young people use it, but these figures show that it's very much not dead. Youtube has taken the most popular top spot amongst adults, overtaking Facebook, so that's quite interesting, I think, and for young adults. So 18 to 24 year olds, snapchat and TikTok are the leading services amongst young adults. One other thing actually was that nearly a quarter of UK online individuals aged 16 plus have used Instagram's micro blogging service, threads, which is a direct competitor of Twitter and basically was launched to try and become Twitter. So that's quite interesting, although it also goes on to kind of say that, you know, in terms of people that are actively using threads, it's like you know, by some measure, a lot less than that.

Speaker 2:

So I think it's just a useful reminder about the importance of social media. But the challenge really, again from an arts and culture perspective, of trying to use all these platforms well, and then when you add in, if you're trying to which most organizations are, if you're trying to reach a younger audience, you know things like TikTok become super important, but it's very, very tricky, as we know, to do well, and I think the last thing I would say is that, in terms of year on year adult audience, monthly Twitter's down a little bit, which you'd expect given the what's happened the last 12 months with Twitter, instagram's slightly up, tiktok up, linkedin up, which again is probably an indication of Twitter's woes. So yeah, so I think that there's loads of other stuff in there about online harm and disinformation that again is super interesting to read through, but for me it's just that reminder that social media still really matters, but how different segments and different types of audience use it is very different, and that's, of course, a challenge.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think a up to date understanding of how your audiences are spending their time and attention is essential. And, as you say, the role of social media is not lessening. It is maybe changing in shape and nature, but people are still spending a lot of time on social media. And, related to the Ofcom report that you mentioned, channel 4 also released some research.

Speaker 1:

In September, alex, my own, the chief exec, shared the findings at the RTS Cambridge Convention and had speeches called Too Much to Watch and laid out the results of some research that the Channel 4 team had done, showing that people spend more than five hours a day watching video. As you've said, a lot of that is consumed through social media, through smaller screens, and a lot of that video is short form video. They broadly chunked the types of video consumption into four groups, so relaxing, passionate, practical and time-filling, and I'll link to the research in the show notes as well. But I do think that it's interesting to look at both where people are spending their time but also why and what are they consuming while they're spending their time there, because an understanding of that, I think, equips cultural organizations to be able to be more valuable and meaningful on those platforms 100%.

Speaker 2:

Another report which we can link to in the show notes is by the International Social Media Agency. We are social and they do a yearly roundup and they talk about exactly that in relation to different platforms that it was always the case that people tended to use Twitter in a slightly different way to how they use Instagram, how they use Facebook, but now it really is like very much. People are going to those platforms for very different things and it's useful to be able to understand that for sure. I think also, a lot of these reports also reference the facet that we've talked about before, which is in relation to all of social media, but particularly video because of it being led by TikTok. Is this notion of stuff being served to users via an interest graph rather than a network graph? Again, it's super important for cultural organizations to think about. Yeah, so it's just some good, solid, interesting sort of background and information that I think is worth everybody having a look at.

Speaker 1:

The final thing I want to talk about is Twitter and its evolution slash collapse, slash disintegration. You know you should have a really great article on the digital works newsletter in Bloomberg from Dave Lee, titled the moral case for no longer engaging with Elon Musk's X. Because you know, Twitter is now a place which actively incentivizes and rewards with money some really, really heinous content and activity. Anyone who has regularly spent time on Twitter over recent years will, I'm sure, have noticed the degradation of the quality of the service. You know there's sort of a lot of really bad and strange ads now inserted into the experience.

Speaker 1:

The for you, as you said algorithmically driven view is antagonistic in the extreme. You see, under almost every post by any public figure, trolls just immediately flood in. Both you and I have spent a lot of time on Twitter over the last 15 years and it's really upsetting to see it degrade so much. But I think when we first started doing this series, we were still you know, there was any matter of months ago. We were still both pretty active on Twitter and it's been interesting to see individuals and organizations leaving the platform.

Speaker 1:

Neither of us now spend much or any time on the platform and I think there are a whole load of issues attached specifically to Twitter. But I think in its degradation there's also been a fragmenting of the sort of social media landscape New platforms trying to capitalize on Twitter's decline you know blue sky threat, as you mentioned, other platforms that have been around for a long time that aren't a like for like comparison with Twitter, but similar enough that some people have gone there, such as Master Don. You know there's all sorts of others. There's post news, there's other new entrance to the market that are trying to capitalize on Twitter's collapse. But I'm wondering what does this tell us both, the shift in the dynamic and the popularity of Twitter and the subsequent sort of exodus from the platform to a number of different locations. Often we say to cultural organizations you know, be where your audience is, and increasingly that's not on Twitter, but it's not just one other place. And for sort of overstretched social teams, what's the what's the guidance here?

Speaker 2:

It's really hard, isn't it? I think what's happened to Twitter is just. It's objectively fairly shocking what has happened to it in a relatively short space of time, and deliberately happened to it as well, because that's what Elon Musk has decided should happen to it. I always, have always always said to arts and culture organizations the thing about Twitter is it does have an outsized position in our culture over, like kind of society because of, historically, who has used the platform so journalists, politicians, celebrities and that means it would always be quoted in mainstream media and you would see it around a lot. And it also was very much as well used by people in specific professions media tech, you know, whatever, whatever, or if somebody had a customer service problem, they knew that they could go and shout at somebody on Twitter about it. Usually, but in terms of a broader audience, I think Twitter was never used as much as things like Facebook, like it or not. A lot of the time, arts and cultural organizations would use it because they themselves, like some people within the organization, used it, or. I suppose what I'm saying is there's no doubt that it is very difficult to lose Twitter as a channel, but I think it's not as terrible in terms of likely impact, as it would be if we also suddenly lost Facebook and Instagram. Regardless of your personal feelings about any of these platforms, you know Facebook is still, by some large measure, much more used than Twitter ever was. The other thing, I think, is it has now got to the point with Twitter, because of the things you've just outlined there, where actually, ethically and morally, arts organizations need to make a decision like is this a place we should be on, regardless of whether or not it's actually, you know, sending traffic to their website and helping them to reach new audiences or reach journeys or whatever else they use it for? There is a question around this is maybe not somewhere where we have these very clear values and things we believe in, and actually Twitter is not very aligned with that. Of course, I'm also aware that once you go down that argument, you can kind of say, well, facebook's hardly ethical, etc. Etc. That's a decision people need to make, I think, in terms of trying to replace it with something like threads or blue sky or mastodon or anything else.

Speaker 2:

Again, I've always said it's better to do less and do it better, you know. So focus on one or two platforms, maybe focus on Instagram and Facebook and get really, really, really good at how you use it, and obviously that means you need to think about effectiveness. What does effectiveness mean? All this stuff is fairly boring in a way, but it's also. It's so easy just to put stuff out on all these channels and then think like that's done. So, although there's no doubt that Twitter going away will be a real shame for many, many reasons, personally I am gutted about it, but I don't think it will have the impact on arts and culture organisations that we might have thought it would, because actually it's always been a smaller part of the kind of suite of channels than some of the other ones. We've recapped quite a lot there.

Speaker 1:

We will link to everything we've discussed in the show notes, but, looking forward, to 2024, you know, I said to you prior to this conversation, it does feel like in 2023, there's been a real fracturing and a fragmenting, and a lot of things that were quite different, already strained have broken and new technologies and new tools have suddenly rapidly developed and sort of thrust themselves into many areas of digital life.

Speaker 1:

And so I do think we're going to look back at 2023 as a bit of an inflection point, which is interesting. But what does that mean for 2024? I think, as you've said, I think we will see a quite a rapid maturation of some of these AI tools and I think, related to that, you will see a maturation of people's adoption of it as well, people starting to figure out how they can usefully involve AI platforms, ai tools, ai driven solutions within their work flows. And I do think you know, with an Optimus hat on for a moment, there are huge sort of efficiency gains that could conceivably be achieved through using AI tools, and so I think we are going to see, quite as I say, a rapid establishing of a more useful marketplace and set of sort of principles around that. I also think that you know we've both touched on research which has looked at how quite radically audience digital habits have shifted and sort of content consumption patterns that have been developing for a number of years are now really prominent.

Speaker 1:

You know the importance of video, particularly the importance of short form video. The amount of time that people are spending on their phones is enormous. You know, again, offcom research shows that people are spending about five hours a day on the internet. That's in addition to the time they spend on the internet at work. So you know, digital is more than ever infused through everyone's lives. Attention spans are getting shorter but, as I've already said, I think cultural organizations have an interesting position they could take in that context. So I think those are two observations that I've had.

Speaker 1:

You know, ai will continue to be more of a thing. I think we've reached the tipping point, for, you know, the rise of mobile. Mobile should now be primary mode through which we expect people to engage with you. You know, short form experiences, again, are the primary way in which people have digital experiences, and those are both important things that cultural organizations should be thinking quite seriously about. Are there any other observations you've made? Emerging principles you think people should be aware of technologies that people should be thinking about as we move through the Christmas period and beyond.

Speaker 2:

I mean, obviously I'd agree Completely about AI, 100% and other stuff we talked about before, more in the near term, so certainly in the next 12 months, how it affects search engine results and all of that is going to be really critical to keep an eye on. I've got a slightly wild card one actually, which maybe is worth some thought Short form video, particularly things like TikTok, we know are growing massively and specifically with a younger audience. It's very difficult for arts and culture organizations to do TikTok well. There are examples but they are very much outliers. There are a few reasons about that which we don't need to get into. But one of the things about TikTok and why it has been so popular, particularly with a younger generation and Gen C, is that authenticity side to it. So the idea whether it is or isn't authentic, a lot of the content on there isn't beautifully produced things. It's funny, it's, you know, it's kind of snapshot stuff, it's whatever. So how does an arts and culture organization get into using it? They either come up with their absolute own style, they hone that down, you know, spend a lot of time working on it, which is hard right, like there aren't many arts and culture organizations that have the sort of in-house resource or even the budget to outsource it, whatever it's tricky, you know.

Speaker 2:

What you see in other sectors is brands working with influencers. Influencers is a dirty word often in arts and culture and it means different things to different people. I do think there is something that is very under explored in arts and culture about how we work with influencers. Arts and culture organizations do. I think people tend to think of it as like oh, here's a tiktoker who's going to talk about this beauty brand. It doesn't have to be that, but as a platform it's growing massively. Short form video is growing massively.

Speaker 2:

Yes, of course, it's great if you can come up with a really unique idea. You can carry that off and you can do it consistently so that you build an audience based on that content. If you can't do that, then maybe it just requires a bit of a different way of thinking about it, some experimentation with how you might work with other people who are already using the platform, essentially. So that was just a kind of random thing that I thought was kind of worth thinking about.

Speaker 2:

Apart from that and of course I would say this, wouldn't I? But it really all of this stuff that's going on really makes you appreciate the importance of investing in your own owned digital platforms rather than just relying on stuff that's owned by very rich billionaires in Silicon Valley who can do what they like. So I think, yeah, we're seeing some great funders coming into the market who are funding really great digital work, and obviously we would love to see more of that. But I think generally, just the principle of like nurturing and looking after your digital platforms is going to be super important.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think that final point is super, super important because, as we've seen with Twitter, sort of investing time and energy, building an audience on a platform that you don't have any control over is an inherently risky strategy. And you see, with every you know big media company, now newspaper company, they're all trying to build specific audiences around specific formats and products. You see at the Guardian, you see at the Financial Times, they have whole teams just dedicated to newsletter strategy. And I do think that's a real underexplored area, for cultural organizations historically have used newsletters as a sort of marketing channel, but actually I think there's real potential mileage in reconsidering how some of those, as you say, owned channels can be shifted towards more engagement or, like, I suppose, like art focused purpose. I think that's a really underexplored opportunity.

Speaker 1:

Well, on that note, happy holidays, happy 2023. We'll see you in 2024. Thanks for listening to this episode of bites. You can find all episodes of the podcast on our website at the digital dot works, where you can also find more information about our events and sign up to the newsletter. Our theme tune is Vienna, beat by blue dot sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.

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Ash Mann

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