This week's best things
The NT on business models, synthetic media, scrolling increases boredom, why people quit, knowledge maps, AI photo editing, and amazing drawings.
Performing arts business models
The National Theatre is conducting a major piece of research looking at the business models of performing arts organisations.
"At the National Theatre, we understand that performing arts organisations have complex business models featuring diverse public and private income sources. Over the last decade, we – like many arts organisations around the UK – have developed our programmes and income streams to better achieve our mission, to overcome the challenges of increasing costs and reduced public funding, to increase impact for communities around the UK, and to take advantage of new technologies. In the early days of a new government, facing a challenging financial situation, we believe it is more important than ever that we engage with policy makers about how arts organisations work, so they can support the sector to thrive, and deploy funding where it has most impact."
National Theatre
From recommendation media to synthetic media
I don't think this graphic (below) tells the whole story, but it paints an accurate enough picture of the direction of travel to be depressing.
Although I don't really know how they're defining 'entertaining' in this context. As my colleague, Katie and I discussed in a recent episode of the Digital Works Podcast, recent research from Google's Jigsaw division into Gen Z consumption habits indicated that "Gen Zers approach most of their digital experience in what the researchers call "timepass" mode, just looking to not be bored"
Scrolling through online videos increases feelings of boredom, study finds
Perhaps linked to the above, this Guardian piece looks at a recent study which highlights many of the 'coping tactics' people are pursuing to try and avoid boredom may in fact exacerbate it.
"Dr Katy Tam at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the lead author of the research, said boredom was closely linked to attention.
“We feel bored when there’s a gap between how engaged we are and how engaged we want to be,” she said. “When people keep switching through videos, they become less engaged with the videos and they are looking for something more interesting. This can lead to increased feelings of boredom.”
The results appear to chime with other studies: as the team notes, previous research has suggested that while boredom relief is a driver for people to use social media or smartphones, the use of such technology appears to make the feeling worse."
Nicola Davis
Why people quit, and knowledge maps
I've read a few things about onboarding (and retaining) people this week.
This piece in Harvard Business Review introduced me to the idea of a 'knowledge map' which feels like a much more useful version of a standard 'org chart' (and which also returns to my ongoing interest in different ways of articulating and visualising how organisations work). I suspect this would be invaluable in most cultural organisations which are usually a mess of inexplicable structures and relationships, decades in the making.
This piece on 'why developers quit' is, as the title suggests, focused on developers but is also - in my view - probably more widely applicable than that. This section is certainly true of many of the folks I've spoken to over the last few years who have left the cultural sector, none of whom were developers, "what does an unmotivated developer feel? Unappreciated (and/or underpaid), Lonely, Bored, Stuck, Apathetic. When a developer quits, it’s almost always because they feel one (or more) of those 5 things."
The AI photo editing era is here, and it’s every person for themselves
An interesting piece in The Verge about the advances in the (AI-assisted) photo editing capabilities that now exist on most smartphones.
As ever there are people running away from this technology as others run towards it.
"Like me, not everyone will have the stomach for it. In fact, some people are running in the opposite direction as fast as they can. iPhone camera app maker Halide just released a new mode called Process Zero that skips the AI and multiframe processing, rolling back the clock to the early days of phone cameras, before computational photography. And Gen Z is fueling something of a vintage digital camera revival, seeking a grittier, lo-fi aesthetic that you don’t get from a modern phone camera app optimized to boost shadows, pump the saturation, and brighten faces."
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Incredible pencil drawings
Kohei Ohmori produces amazing, photorealistic pencil drawings of everyday objects.
They are genuinely staggering, you can read more about his work in this article on Core77.
This week's consumption
I'm reading Enlightenment by Sarah Perry.
Ahead of the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album coming out next Friday I revisited their last album, the beautiful Ghosteen.
I've been following the progress of Kilian Jornet (probably the greatest living mountain runner) on his human-powered mission to summit as many 4,000m peaks in the Alps as he can while making his way between each peak by hiking or cycling. The stats he's racking up are ridiculous, and the photos are stunning.