In ancient Greece, people consulted oracles to learn about the future. The best known resided at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the blind priestess Pythia provided prophetic prediction for all in need of direction. Above its entrance, the temple had an inscription: Know thyself.
In fact, there appear to have been a total of 147 maxims chiselled into the marble – and they are well worth studying in detail if one wants to fine-tune ones moral compass... The first three are the best-known: in addition to self-knowledge, they appeal to moderation and the avoidance of overly strong beliefs or ideology (one might be tempted to call that humility).
It is no surprise that the Sam, as the classicist among the three veterans of the SmallDataForum, came up with our new name, blending the ancient Greek word describing foreknowing – prognosis (with gnosis = knowledge at its heart) with our cherished medium of podcasting. Lo and behold, in an act of neology-meets-etymology, the googlewhacking Podnosticators were born...
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The Small Data Forum podcast was created spontaneously and almost accidentally after your three co-hosts met on a panel at a media industry event in 2016, a few weeks before the EU Referendum.
After a lively debate featuring sometimes radically-divergent views to keep our audience entertained well past the scheduled end time, seasoned podcaster Neville Hobson suggested to podcast ingenus Thomas Stoeckle and Sam Knowles that our ramblechats might work rather well in pod land.
Who were we to argue?
And so it came to pass – with Thomas’ wry titling – that the Small Data Forum came into being, with the inaugural episode dropping on 14 June 2016. Since then, we’ve taken a more-or-less-monthly, sideways look at the uses and abuses of data big and Small in politics, business, and public life.
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With the sun beating down on the Small Data Forum Podnosticators on day three of our podcast recording retreat in Ríogiordo, Andalucía, we turn our attention back to the world of AI and its potential impact on the world of communications.
With a new generative engine popping up almost every day – for words, structure, music, images, film, translation; you name it, it’s appearing – we consider the approach taken by the communications industry to this brave new world.
Neville kicks us off, citing a recent study from the U.K.’s Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) and its global sister, the International Communications Consultancies Organisation (ICCO).
The study found that fully 30% of the two bodies’ members had never used ChatGPT or a similar AI chatbot, while 25% claim they never will, to assist them in their work. Neville finds these figures staggering, while for Sam this shows a remarkable lack of curiosity from an industry that could be massively disrupted by AI, as well as hugely enhanced.
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Fuelled by nothing more than Coke Zero and Fanta Limon, the Small Data Forum Podnosticators pop up for a special, flash, mini, 15-minute micropodcast, recorded during our podcast retreat in Andalucía over the weekend of 10-13 March.
Our topic? The titanic struggle emerging on the future of independent, impartial broadcasting manifested in the battle of Gary vs Suella.
For a change, Neville blows the starting whistle to get us going, passing the ball to football lovers Thomas and Sam, with a shared passion for Liverpool, Arsenal, Fulham, but probably not Brighton.
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Always with fingers on the pulses of the most relevant breaking news stories, the not yet scurvy-plagued triumvirate of the SmallDataForum briefly contemplates the shortages of fruit and veg on Great British supermarket shelves.
And we decide that neither the Marie Antoinette-esque “let them eat turnips” intervention of political-turnip-made Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Therese-with-accents-aigu-et-grave Coffey – nor the seemingly permanently unflushable turds, former-now-shadow Prime Ministers Johnson and Truss, are topics worth any of our (or our listeners) attention.
Sam, of course, wouldn’t know much about those domestic five-a-day-struggles, given his jetting all over EUlandia (Catalonia, Amsterdam etc.), promoting his excellent, not-to-be-missed Using Data Smarter online course, building a “digital ecosystem” – and ZING, just like that, Sam won this episode’s jargon bingo.
How he finds the time to read Times columns is beyond me. But read he does, and so we find ourselves discussing David Aaronovitch’s piece Nobody wants what the Tories are selling (if only they were selling fruit & veg).
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The world is split, riven, and – as we so often observe from the three outposts of the Small Data Forum – like never before. Milk or tea in first? Red sauce or brown sauce on a sausage sandwich? And is it still acceptable to say “Happy New Year” after Blue Monday (the third Monday in January and officially the most depressing day of the year, which this year was also your correspondent’s birthday)?
We three podders from Plague Island seem to be in the “Aye” camp for the third of these modern dilemmas, particularly as this – episode 65 – is our first digital emission of 2023. The year in which things can only get better, as Thomas notes, doubtless inspired by the work of D:Ream.
So Happy New Year, podcats!
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