Hello and welcome to this special edition of the Digital Snapshot, bringing you some of the best digital news, inspiration, tips and guidance for the arts, culture, museums and heritage world over the last year.
Happy New Year! A whole year of the Digital Snapshot has been and gone. Can. You. Believe it. I sure can't.
As you know, I create the Digital Snapshot newsletter once a month and I put lots of interesting digital news links in there related to arts, culture and society. And, like most years, lots of super interesting things have happened in 2024 in the world of digital news and arts/culture. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to kick 2025 off with a look back at 2024.
Before you move on, if you're looking to start 2025 on a high, come along to our Let's Get Real conference. We've got some fantastic speakers and you'll learn all about understanding digital value. Here is a discount code for Digital Snapshot readers: FRIENDS25
Digital in the news 📰
- Last October, Russia fined Google for more money than there is in the entire world. That's two undecillion roubles (a two, followed by 36 zeroes). It's all gone a bit quiet since then, so we'll likely find out a bit more this year.
- In July last year, it was reported that AI drove a 48% increase in Google emissions. As the use of AI continues to increase, I'd imagine that we'll be getting more of these sorts of stories this year too.
- In December 2023, Roly Keating, the Chief Executive of the British Library, shared some great insights from their massive cyber attack. I'm a big fan of the sector being open and honest about these sorts of things and hopefully other organisations were able to better prepare as a result.
What we found useful / shareable 🤓
- Bluesky finally moved out of 'invite only', which worked out for a number of organisations in the arts and culture sector, as they started to flee from Twitter later in the year.
- The Peabody Essex Museum (apparently) became the first organisation in the world to have a TikTok creator in residence. I put apparently in brackets because it's a big old world and I'm sceptical of the title. Still very interesting though!
- Early in the phase of organisations and individuals abandoning Twitter, the Association of Cultural Enterprises produced a thoughtful post explaining their rationale behind their decision to leave the platform. Some saw this as a bold step at the time, but I'd say they were ahead of the curve.
These were distracting / entertaining / inspiring 💥
- The Royal Armouries made some great social content last year. I particularly liked this 'Get Ready With' style video of a soldier fighting during the War of the Roses.
- It will be impossible to forget the Glasgow Wonka Experience. A case study in why it's important to heavily edit your AI generated content.
- A number of artists started to fight back against AI with data poisoning. Again, we'll likely see more of this in 2025 as creatives try to better protect their work from the tentacles of machine learning.
Some things that were good 👍
- I really liked the Playbrary, from the National Library Board in Singapore. It used AI to turn public domain books into adventure games.
- I also enjoyed this picture of the ruins of Whitby Abbey being completed by drone light. I'm a sucker for pretty lights this time of year.
- Finally, I also enjoyed the 'make it more' trend where users were asking AI to take AI-generated images and then 'make it more something', like 'make it more spicy'.
And that’s all for this special edition, looking back on some of the interesting news over the last year.
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You can find all past editions of the Digital Snapshot here.
Alec Ward
Consultant - Lead for Digital Content and Skills, The Audience Agency
