Arianna Huffington posted this a few days ago, about how much New Media to let into museums. I've been entertaining holiday guests and too busy to post till now, but I have been thinking about what she says.
It isn't that Huffington provides great insight into where museums are or should be going. It is more important because how often do museums have thoughtful, literate people who are not trained in museum studies, or with a PhD in Art History or 10 years of experience running a science center, but who have embraced new media, talk to them about new media and offer this hands-off point of view.
I think that as an outsider Huffington has missed some of the point of a few of the museums she gives as examples' various web-based projects--that some of them are much more experimental than she seems to think--because most people who come from a traditional museum background see only the telos of the closed museum. However, when museum audiences embrace a post-modern vision of the museum as the final authority on how it does business, but not necessarily on every detail, this kind of new media begins to make more sense.
This conversation is one I keep coming back to. How do museums embrace the changes in how we interpret objects, present information, use the internet, in a way that makes sense to people who have grown up with a completely different conception of museums? What does rebranding museums as a place of dialogue rather than education look like? How do we get people like Arianna Huffington to see where we are going and get on board? Or do we just have to wait for a younger generation to come forward and carry on museums as they have always understood them?
We're doing some research at the Science Museum into ways of getting our audiences to engage with objects using new media (rather than just making the most of the marketing potential). One thing that has become clear is that the web is really great for helping people to do things that they've always done - talking about our collections, participating in activities around our collections and learning from our collections. The web is another forum for all those things, and one where the Museum gets to be an ongoing part of the conversation.
ReplyDeleteI think it's really important to do what you guys are doing, or a little crowd sourcing via the web in a new exhibition design or whatever and stepping beyond outreach. I just keep coming back to how do museums relate their intentions to older members of their public, who see museum and media so separately. Huffington isn't alone in seeing new media as a perversion or a blockade. Maybe initiatives like yours will help that, as exhibits and NM blend more semlessly.
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