What comes after social media?

Finding ways to activate the "gentle spirits of our land"

I had a curious experience when writing my recent post about the workings of the political status quo. I wanted the footage from the Senate Committee with Sarah Hanson-Young questioning David Anderson from the ABC, so naturally, I Googled it.

Long story short, Google wouldn’t find it—I got a lot of links to hearings from years ago as well as promoted content—but not the footage I wanted.

However, when I asked GPT4—the new browser-enabled version of the Chat-GPT artificial intelligence program—to find it, no problem. A little more prodding and it also gave me useable summaries of the whole issue around Stan Grant and the ABC’s coverage of the Coronation.

It’s only one example, I know, but since browser-enabled ChatGPT was released—which can search the current web and not just rely on data sets that stopped in 2021—it has been obvious that we are moving into a new online era.

All this made me wonder how digital spaces are changing, and as it happens, my current experience of this newslette…