Content of the Week #4: Cozy

There are only three certain things in life: death, taxes and desperately trying to hang social media content on a seasonal event.

It’s October, so it’s the season of changing your name to things like ‘The Boowes Museum’, ‘Slenderman Museum’ or ‘The British Museum’. The other option is talking about wrapping up warm and drinking pumpkin spice lattes. That’s the law.

So my content of the week is something that ties into the seasonal change in a more subtle but satisfying way – it’s a man lighting a fire at Hampton Court Palace.

What I like about this video is two things.

The first thing is the simplicity and meditative quality of it.

There’s a thing in Japanese craftsmanship called monozukuri – “the art of making things.” There’s a bit of that in watching this man repeat a task he has obviously done a million times before – every step is practised, methodical and calm.

There’s a satisfaction knowing that fires have been made in this way, in the same hearth, for centuries.

And there’s an ASMR element. The only sounds are those of wood splitting, the striking of flint and the crackling of a fire well made. Not a phone in sight, just a yeoman living in the moment.

The second thing I like is how a piece of content like this gets made.

It’s easy to get used to the background tasks and small events that happen in heritage sites every day. If you work in a heritage site, it’s worth sitting down with a piece of paper and writing down everything that happens onsite – no matter how small – and wait for the diamond in the rough to appear, and think ‘we could film that.’

Anyway, it’s cozy. And it’s not torturous. Just a nice bit of content to waste a minute of your life, which is why we’re all on social media in the first place.

What else I’m thinking about

I had a depressing time reading this article by Simon Brew from Film Stories: We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real | Google, and the future of writing about film.

I’ve been wondering how safe cultural institutions are from both AI and Google’s incessant enshittification. We’re insulated in the sense that (almost?) no organisations survive on website advertising, and most of our online content is meant to inform, educate and entertain rather than earn money directly.

In marketing terms, it’s bringing people into our funnels – and that, potentially, is at risk if websites start churning out AI-written articles on GLAM-related topics.

I don’t know if I’ve seen much of that – only the avalanche of AI-generated fake history images plaguing Facebook. It’s that imagery which can be used in culture wars, creating images of a past that never existed but which people still hark for. At the moment we have to rely on the public and accounts like Fake History Hunter to point it out, but maybe there’s a role for GLAM institutions to do the same.