Social Media and Cultural Communication

Here is another installment in my constant musings on the impact of social media on the museum. It’s cold around the country this weekend so enjoy!

In the 1990s museum content began to emerge from behind the walls of institutions to appear on distributed websites, and the internet became a common medium through which to display, in a limited way, the cultural knowledge within the institution. This movement ‘beyond the walls’ brought about a rise in debate around notions of deterritorialisation (where the museum was no longer bound by a single built entity) and dematerialisation (where the relationship between audience and institution became more malleable). (Kenderdine 1996) (Silverstone 1994). At the same time, critique around the experience of visiting ‘real’ physical sites vs. ‘virtual’ experiences became topical(Pearce 1995; Trant 1998). Since that time, debate has continued to range around the value of online display, the effect that it has on the aura of the object, the authenticity of experience and the power/knowledge relationships with the museum.

    While the dominate discourses which surrounded the early internet were played out in opposition between the real and the virtual, the implicit critique centred around how such virtual experiences might undermine the expertise and social standing of the museum. Trant suggested how the use of the internet to deliver museum content could be viewed as a potentially powerful networked system which provided greater authority to the museum, by creating trusted cultural networks (1998). While there were some early Australian programs which encouraged cross-institutional content sharing (such as the Australian Museum’s Online project, there was little emphasis on the development of user-created content. This was partly a result of the limited interactivity afforded by early internet technologies and was philosophically underpinned by the dominant discourses of the time. The creation of a new medium in itself did little to respond to the need for audiences to ‘make meaning’ of their experiences (Hooper-Greenhill 2000); the value of community voices and their role in developing a broader understanding of cultural content (Witcomb 1999); the location of the museum within popular culture ((Moore 1997) and the experiences and images which audiences bring with them when visiting museums. (Wallace 1995)     With the advent of social media, those technologies which provide a platform for three-way communication, there is a real possibility to respond to these agendas in a structured way. It could be said that the tools to share this new information online thus forming communities of interest, recontexualizes as Benjamin (1969) had done, the nature of new spaces presented to us in the wake of technological change.

Dawson (2002) provides some compelling arguments to suggest that innovation requires collaboration. Three-way communication which responds to the knowledge which audiences bring with them, establishes the foundation for new models of interaction and participation. Without exploring these in structured ways, there is a chance that museums will lose the potential to lead innovation. Poullson and Kale (2004) define commercial experiences as “an engaging act of co-creation between a provider and a consumer wherein the consumer perceives value in the encounter and in the subsequent memory of that encounter.” While their thesis is directed toward the creation of commercial experiences, is it so far from the types of interaction and participation which we would hope to achieve in the cultural sector? The creation of cultural interactive experiences will need to extend to not just interacting with audiences but engaging them in this act of co-creation. In my next post I will be exploring this in more detail.

As part of the series on ’sites’ of display in the museum, I give you this gem – where the ‘real’ becomes virtual!

Museum exhibitions have the potential to weave memories of self, to reconfigure adult as re-collector/ child as collector relationships. The museum becomes the mnemonic site for both the factual and remembered world of a collective museum. Reality is mixed with fantasy to produce experiences which are disorienting, explorative and ultimately individual.

An example of this is The Museum of Jurassic Technology which was established in Los Angeles by David Wilson in 1982. The museum sits between the unassuming façade of a laundry and Korean takeaway in a suburban street of Los Angeles. The façade displays both the name of the museum above the entrance and an elongated cloth sign which reads “No-one may ever have the same knowledge again, Letters to Mt Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935.”

The art critic, Ralph Rugoff, describes the museum as cluttered with traditional glass showcases, displays of preserved insects, skeletons, minerals, dioramas of science and technology. He has studied the meticulously researched and exhaustively written captions, has considered the dim lighting and factual displays. But somewhere within this meticulous display of Jurassic Technology, Rugoff describes a ‘faint scratching at the back of the mind”(Rugoff, 1995: 69-81).

The museum publishes an explanatory pamphlet where it describes itself as an educational institution “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” It provides the academic community with a specialised knowledge space where research and display come together, combining relics and artefacts with an emphasis on unusual or curious qualities. The pamphlet describes the term museum as a spot dedicated to the muses, a “place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs“. The pamphlet introduces the scholars whose works are collected and displayed, their personal histories and the function of their research within the greater scientific environment.

Rather than conveying ready to digest information, the exhibits unsettle with information about information. The artifacts start to dematerialize into a field of questions about display and the nature of knowledge. Instead of asking viewers to suspend disbelief, it leads us beyond belief. The museum does not discredit rational scholarship, rather it embraces its rhetoric as a peculiar and distinctive voice which it uses to consciously fuse real events with imaginary ones, true research with specious discourse. Rugoff proposes that this model of museum presents a technology for altering habitual ways of seeing and thinking, thus freeing us from the museum’s traditional objectivity and opening the way to our individual recovery of authority in the subjective museum-going experience. While the museum disorients and confuses, it leaves us with the feeling that questions are worth holding onto and that uncertainty plays a part in the pleasure of the social act of museum-going.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology remains one of the few long-standing examples of how our collective memory of the museum can be reconceptualised to create a virtual physical space. If you get a chance, you should visit it!

Round at Museum30.ning, Seb posted an article on Ross Dawson’s stalk on the Future of the Museum. You can read his notes here

What strikes me is the ease with which Ross captured the prevalent issues in the sector. This could be for a couple of reasons: perhaps because he is a leading business communications professional or it could be because to those outside of the museum sector, the issues are often blindingly obvious.

In museum circles, the issues raised are often discussed as though they had only just occured. The notion of the ‘media museum’ for instance, has been with us for a long while yet there continues to be extraodinary resistance to the idea of media technology being employed to create cultural interactive experiences.

Ironically, the history of museum ‘experience design’ includes significant examples of technological wonder, for instance: The Great Exhibition of 1851 heralded a new era of cultural event where Universal Exhibitions would define the progress of Western civilisation. The rhetoric of progress, so much a part of the nineteenth century, translated into a call to excel and be productive. Within the doctrine of continued progress, there was an implicit societal trust in technological and material advance. Exhibitions were useful mechanisms through which to display these social and political developments.

In our quest to highlight what is valuable and specific to the museum environment, we seem to forget that the communication of content has always been at the centre of the museum program.
 
Even though I research the museum sector and spend a great deal of time writing about technology, I am increasingly despairing of significant change while the sector itself (apart from bright lights such as work from Powerhouse and Australian Museums), as I listen to the almost deafening silence when it comes to considering the role of technology as central to museum communication.

The museum sector would do well to move away from a sense of its own importance to demonstrating the true value it can bring to lives. As cultural networks proliferate, the museum is ideally placed to lead discussion and debate, to create participatory media and develop the role of the active cultural participant.

Just as it carved out its role as gatekeeper, the future museum can become the leader of digital cultural communication, creating opportunities for co-creation between audiences and organisations by adopting representative curatorial practices.

Until then, it struggles with ideologies it seems to have created despite the excellent research and development that has occured over the past 40 years!