I did a talk at the University of Reading recently for a load of marketing students where I felt like Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan.

I think we kid ourselves about how carefree social media used to be (4chan has been around since 2003), but the social graph algorithms at least gave us some control over how we curated our feeds. We still had our echo chambers but it felt less like the platforms were pumping up our own biases and fears. It also felt easier to have a breakout post, whereas today if you don’t dance to the interest graph algorithm’s tune your post gets sent into oblivion.

But some things remain constant. The people and analytical skills you need to thread the needle of what works for your organisation and your audience, how to build the structures to avoid you getting fired for gross misconduct, and how to prioritise your creativity without burning out.

The foundations remain the same, but tactics are always changing.

Content of this week

• Have you got old books? Have people doodled in them? It’s catnip to audiences. Everyone’s seen a bit of old writing in an old book, but there’s something about a person hundreds of years ago idly doodling chickens that is very relatable even centuries later.

• Speaking of manuscripts, I liked this examination of one by Reading Museum. Taking an extra half hour to highlight bits of text and cut them out to show them off really elevates the whole thing.

• The falling hairstyle format. If you’ve got a painting of a bald person in the collection then drag it out.

• ‘and for the lady perhaps a X’ is a pretty versatile format for any stabbies you have.

• things at my local theatre that just make sense

• All the theatres I’ve worked for are too small for this to work :(

The bullet point bit

• Danyele Higgins & co. are looking for sponsors for the Social Media in Arts and Heritage Conference. The one last year was really good, and it’s the only time social media managers in the sector can get together and complain about Meta business suite.

• There’s been a lot of stuff recently about how much experience matters for cultural visits, and then I saw this NYT article about how the Museum of the Moving Image in New York doubled its visitors in one year. “Pop culture and high art coexist here”, and they also fixed the air conditioning.

• You’ve only got a couple of weeks to feed into Ash Mann’s hidden digital work survey.

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I finished Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founder Trilogy yesterday, which has one of the more interesting magic systems I’ve seen in sci-fi/fantasy. Basically the world runs on systems and logic based on sigils, and people found a way to discover those sigils and use them to inscribe objects to do or be things beyond their nature - like making walls more durable, or make an object forget gravity exists. This escalates until they basically knock on god’s door and ask to remake (or destroy) reality itself.

🐕 Keith

Here he is