Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 09/06: History Questions and Bedroom Makeovers

People are looking for answers.

Welcome back to our daily Covid-19 bulletins. Today we’re looking at a rising interest in history, and people using their time to redecorate.

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Questions of history

When we live through a major event, we often want to look back and ask ourselves ‘how did we get here?’. We figured, as we work our way through a global pandemic and mass protests call for major societal change, that history books the world over would be getting dusted off.

To research this in the digital world, we focused on /r/AskHistorians. A pretty self-explanatory subreddit, its purpose is for Redditors to post questions about history and get responses from the community. Often the questions are detailed and nuanced, meaning Google is unlikely to return a useful result without a lot of digging.

To give you an idea of the kinds of questions asked, they can range from ‘How did the dandelion, an edible and remarkably versatile plant, come to be classified as a weed?’ to ‘If a King fell in battle, was anyone ‘allowed ‘ to kill him or did the common soldier avoid him for their higher ranks to kill him?’.

Here’s what the subreddit’s activity has looked like since January.

After a steady two months, activity jumped up at the end of March, specifically in the week of the 30th. By this point many national lockdowns had been enforced.

The topics around this time were broad, ranging from questions about the Roman Empire to the Society Union. But there was also an uptick in questions around the Spanish flu, pandemics, and quarantines.

While Covid-19-related questions have been asked on the subreddit since, they’ve by no means taken over. The increase in questions and replies relate to many different areas of historical interest.

Looking at the subreddit’s most popular questions in the most recent week, they’ve referred to PTSD during the Crusades and democracy on pirate ships. But others also reflect the events of the day, with questions about war memorials, the use of tear gas, and protests.

We’ve reported before that people are educating themselves during the pandemic. With schools and libraries closed in many places, people will turn to other learning resources available to them. Reddit is no exception.

Where the magic happens

Bedrooms are our safe havens, and that’s even more true in a pandemic.

Using our Consumer Research platform, we found there were 12% more English-language mentions of bedroom decoration in March, April, and May than there were in the three months prior. And comparing mentions in the last three months to average volumes in the same period in 2017, 2018, and 2019, conversation is up 9%.

Our private spaces have clearly become more important to us during lockdown.

There were 1m mentions in March, April, and May from people who had made changes to their bedrooms because it was their only quiet living space in lockdown. There were also 614k mentions of making the space work for remote working life.

But how are people redecorating their spaces? In the last 90 days, our Image Insights tools revealed that images shared with captions about renovations tend to feature easy alterations like:

Indoor plants (15%)
Wall prints (7%)
Blue paint and fabrics (5%)
Shelving (5%)
Pink lighting (2%)

Image Insights also found that 2% of the pictures posted included comic books. These were both from people who had found them while clearing out their storage spaces, and from those who made decorations out of them.

All in all, there were 337k people talking about how their bedrooms were where they’ve felt happiest in the last three months.

In the coming months, especially if lockdown measures continue or come back, it could become even more important for consumers to make their spaces feel like their own.

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team

Digital Consumer Intelligence

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