Issue 111: No tact to the Online Safety Act

Welcome to issue 111 of Digital Things, by Alec Ward. I’ve tried something a little different this month - I’ve gone for fewer links but I’ve added more thoughts around each link. I hope you like it. But if you don’t there’s a form at the bottom where you can share your feedback.

As always, I appreciate you reading this. Much love, enjoy, chat later, bye.

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• I’m fascinated by the use of Lidar technology, particularly in dense jungles and fairly unexplored areas. This is a great YouTube Short on a lost city found in the jungles of Mexico, using Lidar. Just a constant reminder that we know less than 0.1% of our history on this planet.

• I spend more time than I should thinking about user journeys and good design. Probably because of many a frustrated website trip or digital intervention exploration spent furiously searching for the menu button, or the contact us form. So here's a useful reminder that design which makes sense to you, may not make sense to everyone.

• You might have spotted that the GOV.UK website has had a rebrand. Well, maybe not a rebrand... more of a refresh. It's blue now. When I spoke to my wife about it, she said that "the old one looked more intimidating". I think that’s a fair assessment of many aspects of the GOV.UK website and a keen insight into why they've likely changed it. Also apparently blue is the universal colour for trustworthiness, safety and stability - the less said about that, the better. Here's a great blog post from an insider at the Government Digital Service, outlining the reasoning for the change and some of the process.

• Facebook is making moves to restrict the reach of unoriginal content. Generally I think that this is a good thing, particularly to help spread misinformation and the stealing / regurgitation of other people’s content. But it might mean that you need to re-think your marketing activities if you're regularly sharing the same content on your page and / or cross posting that same content to different Facebook pages. It will likely mean that Sharing will increase in importance, rather than new Posts for the same content.

• Haydn Corrodus has shared a really useful overview of Instagram's new Repost feature. Haydn believes that it could be a ‘game changer for organic reach’ and in essence it’s a public version of the Share feature, which used to allow users to Share your content to their Stories or via DMs. To think about how to better use the new feature, Haydn suggests ‘what’s the one piece of content you could post this month that your audience would want to put on their own feed?’ - which I think is a great provocation to get you thinking about your content and audience interests.

• London Museum has launched an AI Chatbot which allows users to query collections, blogs, and stories using natural language. It’s pretty cool and I also like that the model is only connected to the museum’s own collections data, not the wider internet. So that at least means it won’t go rogue and start sharing inaccurate information. It does mean that you get a lot of ‘I can’t tell you that’ style responses from the chatbot, though.

• The Vagina Museum has had to censor their website due to the Online Safety Act. We have also recently seen that Wikipedia has lost its challenge against the Online Safety Act verification rules. I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Online Safety Act over the last couple of weeks and I still can’t decide where I fall on it. I appreciate what they’re trying to do (at least, what they say they’re trying to do) in protecting young people from harmful content. Growing up I saw a lot of stuff in my teens which I wish I hadn’t, in the burgeoning days of the internet on our phones and the ever increasing virality and shareability of clips. But at the same time this feels like they’re trying to use a hammer to fix in a screw - wrong tool for a necessary job.

• Here are some great insights into the future of search for cultural organisations, written by Katie Moffat. I’ve had quite a few conversations with different arts and culture organisations about how Search is changing and what that might mean for them. It’s a difficult one, because we’ve built our websites on the assumption that people will visit and, by visiting, will potentially explore the website and find our other offers. AI summaries will mean that our information is still being sourced (potentially mixed in with who knows what) but that the potential of further exploration is limited. I guess we’ll see what the future holds.

• MIT Researchers have looked into the impact on using AI on critical thinking skills and the results are... concerning. I sometimes wonder if the same (perhaps to a lesser extent) could be said of activities changed by the internet age. Like for example if you asked someone to research an answer to a question vs just Google searching an answer to a question. But AI is on a much larger scale and the implications for everyday tasks are much larger. It does make me concerned about the future, particularly for younger generations (like my son’s) where AI could theoretically do all of the interesting things about learning - like the discovery of an answer - for us. But I ask, who could have seen this coming? Not. A. Single (everybody). Person.

• Charity Digital has published their Digital Skills report and there is A LOT in it. I made a quick overview with some of the highlights over on LinkedIn. But td;lr, charities are increasingly using data for decision making, email marketing is still taking a backseat, and a large chunk of charities have either poor or non-existent cybersecurity provisions. But it’s well worth checking out the full report.

• Ash Mann has created an interesting overview of organisational archetypes in the cultural sector, based on his research into the challenges of doing digital work in the sector. It really reminds me of Kati Price and Dafydd James' 2018 research into the structure of digital teams within the sector - suggesting that a dispersed model for digital across multiple teams is the ideal, but that in most cases this forms in ad-hoc, decentralised ways.

• Supercool have published their 'Cultural Website Sustainability Benchmark Report', in collaboration with Digital Carbon Online. Lots of interesting stuff in there. Though in the wake of AI and the horrendous cost of energy consumption, I do wonder if focusing on the carbon footprint of our websites is a drop in the ocean. But, if we want those oceans to remain I guess we have to at least try.

📺 Watching: My wife and I are currently working our way through Day of the Jackal. I’m really enjoying it and struggling to find any characters that I actually like - which I think is the point of the show. Mostly, I feel sorry for the families of the protagonist / antagonists in the show. Either way, it’s a great watch.

🎮 Playing: We’ve just jumped into Grounded 2. It’s a multiplayer survival exploration based game where you play as a bunch of teenagers who have been shrunk down to a size smaller than an ant as you explore a giant park, try to survive and try to discover what happened. Real ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’ vibes. We played the original when it first came out back in 2020 and we really enjoyed it (despite it being incredibly buggy, pardon the pun). This one is buggy too, both in the number of actual insects and the number of game-breaking issues. But it’s still in early access and overall it’s good fun.

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