Weeknote #33: Focus

What happened this week?

A week churning through a growing to-do list, trying to focus on one thing at a time and ticking-off multiple admin tasks. Often the tasks you think will be simple open up a range of further questions and the list expands again.

This work was balanced with a range of Steering Groups and Boards, including: Responsible Stewardship looking across all the programmes in place to protect people, buildings, data; and, Digital Preservation, a more focussed session tracking file management, back-logs and technical set-ups.

On Wednesday I chaired the AI Steering Group where we delved into the results of the AI Staff Survey. As you might expect from a Library, the topic has surfaced strong ethical concerns across reliability, copyright, and climate impact. We continue to proceed with catuion, identifying possible use cases of AI for specific tasks and contexts, but also identifying areas where we should leave it alone.

(On this topic, Ghost in the Machine at the Edinburgh Film Festival was a detailed exploration of the ideological underpinnings of AI, although these threads became lost in a muddled and over-simplistic second half ⭐⭐⭐)

On Thursday I joined a Heritage Fund review meeting in an observational capacity, which is always interesting. Proposals included forest restoration, live musuem experiences and the inevitable church roof. I noticed the Fund are looking for an AI Innovation Manager: £50,313 to £59,423 (fixed term, full time).

GovCamp Scotland is one month away and the ticket ballot closed with twice as many submissions as available spaces. Cue some detailed thinking about randomised selection processes and managing waitlists. As a loosely connected group of volunteers, managing finance, data, and comms can be tricky and a more formal structure is probably needed next year.

Finally, schools are back and the What's App groups are kicking off. It is a lot. Navigating the stream of questions reminds me of a Jack Dee sketch about people phoning radio talk shows to say "I don't know".

Interesting things

• Spotted via Seb Chan, a comment by cyberethnographer and designer Ruby Justice Thelot, on why some young people are drawn to older single-purpose technologies:

Younger generations like Gen-Z are signalling through their purchases that the activities they do with these single-purpose devices are highly intentional. They want to be focused when listening to music, taking pictures and recording video. They care deeply about these activities. That focus is almost impossible with devices that are functionally divergent as there as simply too many distractions.

I'm really interested in these ideas of friction and focus and there's a growing uneasiness around how we navigate a multi-functional digital realm. Some related stuff:

• Screentime isn't the problem - "We used to carry phones. Now the digital layer carries us: nudging, sorting, shaping what we see and do."
• Rebuilding the Computer Room - "Making computers more portable didn’t just make it easier for us to get to digital services; it made it easier for digital services to get to us."
• Stop making things more than they are - a BlueSky plea.
• The Portal Trap - "A single entry point or 'portal' can help users navigate complexity, but it cannot replace the need to fix that complexity at source."
• Organizations are addition machines - why people systematically overlook subtractive changes.

Other things:

• An AI Writing Policy for staff from Sophie Alpert, including: "You must stand by every sentence"; and, "More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it."
• Lots of great links and insights from Neil Williams' latest month note, including this acerbic review of The Odyssey: "Aspect ratio is no substitute for character". Plus, some nice little websites: Ordinary Abundance, Recipe Tables and The Public Ledger of Design Crimes.
• The Declaration Room - an interesting AI-powered debating chamber with historical figures, although it still feels like you need an expert (human) guide.
• The hardest working font in Manhattan: A deep deep dive into the Gorton font. One of the joys of working in cultural organisations is the palimpsest of fonts gone by, surfaced in persistent signage and the ghosts of long-forgotten rebrands.

Watching, listening, reading, doing

📺 My Brilliant Career (Netflix) - Yet another historical series with a contemporary pop soundtrack and big bold text overlays. A low-stakes, enjoyable watch ⭐⭐⭐⭐

🩰 Ihsane - Genuinely moving and memorable ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎤 David O'Doherty: At This Stage - "How is this a thing?": no deviation from the tried-and-tested format, but as funny as ever. It was nice to chat briefly post-show (here we are with his big head) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎧 The Five Components of Interesting - A compelling exploration of the concept of "interestingness" in advertising, contrasted with the all-consuming "boreplex".

🎧 I enjoyed the Guardian Football Weekly's Premier league predictions. Main take away: everything is unpredictable.

🏃 The Maple Park Run was fun and very friendly last weekend.

Finally, I spotted this portal to the ealy 1980s in a field in Cheshire.