Museum Communication and Social Media

The Connected Museum

Kirsten Drotner, Kim Christian Schrøder

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135053413
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Museum Studies

Visitor engagement and learning, outreach, and inclusion are concepts that have long dominated professional museum discourses. The recent rapid uptake of various forms of social media in many parts of the world, however, calls for a reformulation of familiar opportunities and obstacles in museum debates and practices. Young people, as both early adopters of digital forms of communication and latecomers to museums, increasingly figure as a key target group for many museums. This volume presents and discusses the most advanced research on the multiple ways in which social media operates to transform museum communications in countries as diverse as Australia, Denmark, Germany, Norway, the UK, and the United States. It examines the socio-cultural contexts, organizational and education consequences, and methodological implications of these transformations.

Part I Framing the Dilemmas

Curation or Cocreation?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203500965-2

1 The Trusted Artifice

Reconnecting with the Museum's Fictive Tradition Online

Ross Parry

DOI: 10.4324/9780203500965-3

In her subtle and original study of storytelling within social media, British sociolinguist Ruth Page (2012, p. 168) draws attention to the part of ‘identity play’ online, and the consequences this has for the ‘distrust of pseudoauthenticity’. Whilst highlighting the distinctive features of narrative genres within social media, Page’s discourse analysis reveals patterns of ‘deception through omission’, ‘concealed identity’, and ‘impersonation’ (Page, 2012, pp. 169–177). What emerges is not only a complex layering of identities with these computer-mediated communications (a differentiation between transportable identities across media, discourse-based roles, and situated identities that individuals inscribe and invoke in their online contributions), but, to Page (2012, p. 166), the very boundaries between the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’ are seen to have been ‘complicated by the contemporary practice of self-representation in digital media’.

How should museums respond to such inaccuracies and fictions of the social web? Ought museums to sharply differentiate themselves, emphasizing in contrast their evidence and trustworthiness? Or should they instead adapt and tune (a little more) into some of the performative discourses of online culture? Is it the case that museums are more comfortable with the illusory when it is framed (and controllable) on-site, rather than online? Is it the case that museums are more willing to explore the artificial in the physical venue, yet more likely to revert to a more dominant information mode (of databases, evidence and linked data) on the web—and if so, why? This chapter considers the context of these questions, specifically the relationship between museums and the fictive dimension of the web. Drawing from philosophy, sociology, economics and media studies, my approach here will maintain the multidisciplinary perspective of this volume as a whole, and, in doing so, it will attest to museums studies’ enduring profile as a subject characterized by its freedom of movement across traditional academic boundaries. The chapter underscores the volume’s attempts to understand (and show the value of) the historical contexts of the web and social media alongside those of policy and technology. More specifically, the aim here is to contribute further to the efforts of other chapters to theorize and reflect more deeply on the idea of ‘participation’ (particularly through social media) and its intellectual and practical consequences for museums and museum studies.

My discussion works from an assumption that the web’s anomic quality (reformulating equations of trustworthiness, testing distinctions between professional and amateur, and relativizing what might be deemed authentic) still remains problematic for the museum. The consequence, it is suggested here, is that museums have remained mostly cautious on the web, reverting more often to traditional functions—predicated on their store of empirical evidence, and their academic credentials. Yet, this chapter will propose that, in doing so, museums have tended to resist a fictive tradition that has been a strong part of their (pre-web) history. This is a fictive tradition of using artifice (alongside the original), the illusory (amidst the evidenced), and make-believe (betwixt the authenticated). These are the well-established curatorial techniques of imitation (showing and using copies), illustration (conveying ideas without objects), immersion (framing concepts in theatrical and performative ways), and irony (speaking figuratively, or even presenting something knowingly wrong for effect). My discussion, therefore, will consider some of the consequences of museums reclaiming these approaches online. In particular, it is through proposing evolved notions of the authentic, the value of mimesis and the place of trust that my aim here is to set the terms of reference through which museums can become complicit with (rather than counter to) the performative aspects of the web, and how they can reconnect with the illusions that (off-line) have been such a defining part of museums’ identity and role.

TRUST AND ACCURACY ON THE ANOMIC WEB

The web is still problematic, not just for museums, but for any traditional and established provider of rich content within the knowledge economy. Indeed, Drotner and Schrøder (2010, pp. 5–6) attest to the ‘tensions’ and ‘dilemmas’, the ‘oppositions’ and ‘complexities’ that still characterize our use and study of the web in these domains. It is evident that after two decades, the case may have been made for the museum online (Parry, 2010), yet the culture sector—like others around it—is still working through the consequences of being ‘dramatically connected’ (Shirky, 2008, p. 11). On a practical level, the museum today still wrestles with the managerial and design challenges of embedding and sustaining an online presence (De Niet, Heijmans & Verwayen, 2010; Ellis, 2011), as well as how to measure the extent and value of this provision (Finnis, Chan & Clements, 2011).

Yet, beneath these strategic challenges and policy choices, sits (according to some theses) a web medium that is, if not anomic (or normless) then at least in a state of fluidity where some essential principles for the museum related to trust, accuracy and artifice, all remain difficult to fix. An articulation of this sense of normlessness can be found in the work of Russell Hardin. Writing from an American moral and political philosophy perspective, Hardin (2008, p. 106) leaves us doubting whether ‘standard vocabulary for describing and explaining human relationships’ fits our behavior online. It is a reading of the web as something ‘lawless’ and ‘normless’. From a vantage point in cultural sociology, writers such as Martin Hand (2008), likewise, have highlighted the anxieties that flow from an atomized and citizen-consumer world online of ‘unparalleled but ultimately meaningless choice’ (p. 18). And it is here that we see Shirky (2008) describing social organizations and relationships ‘radically altered’ (p. 21) by the web. In a book focused upon ‘new kinds of group-forming’, and built around a ladder of action, enabled by social media tools (‘sharing’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘collec-tive action’), the language of Shirky’s thesis might be unsettling for established institutions such as museums (Shirky, 2008, pp. 17, 49). His is a web in which barriers to collective action have ‘collapsed’, and in which the work of noninstitutional groups consequently presents ‘a profound challenge to the status quo’ (Shirky, 2008, pp. 22, 48).

With this absence and ambiguity around norms (this anomic quality) on the web, equations around ‘trust’ are particularly vulnerable to renegotiation and reformulation. The web (particularly within its most recent participatory, aggregated, syndicated formation) poses museums and museum users alike with a series of problems about how trust works and what is trustworthy online. When all users of the web are essentially authors and creators (collectors and exhibitors), the indices for trustworthiness need revisiting. ‘When we are all authors’, British commentator Andrew Keen (2011, p. 65) challenges, if somewhat mischievously, ‘and some of us are writing fiction, whom can we trust?’ The web, in short, has become a ‘peculiarly extreme context’ for developing trust (Hardin, 2008, p. 98). In more general terms, ‘trust’ is a notoriously difficult concept to engage with and to discuss, and the academic literature around it has thought to be ‘confused’—even by some of its own scholars (Hardin, 2008, p. 17). Writing, for instance, from the perspective of management studies, McKnight and Chervany (2001) have acknowledged how researchers have ‘remarked and recoiled’ (p. 27) at the confusion that sits within the literature within trust. They see this in part as a consequence of ‘narrow intra-disciplinary research definitions’ of trust and the multiple meanings that the word carries (McKnight & Chervany, 2001, p. 27). Despite these conflations, ‘trust research’ does, nonetheless, alert us usefully to the critical role of trust for the success of a computer-supported society (Falcone and Castelfranchi, 2001, p. 55). Specifically, Falcone and Castelfranchi identify ‘people’s trust in the computational infrastructure; people’s trust in potential partners, information sources, data, mediating agents [. . .]; and agents’ trust in other agents and processes’ (pp. 55–56), as some of the key sites at which trust is important within digital and network settings. More crucially, trust research tells us that the ‘new scenarios’ for trusting online will transfigure our older frames of reference (Falcone, Singh & Tan, 2001, p. 1). For museums, this can mean entering into what (some) trust researchers would call new ‘trust-based behaviour’, such as cooperation, information sharing, informal agreement (McKnight & Chervany, 2001, pp. 34–35). Some of the more recent considerations within digital heritage of museums building relationships within network settings, whether on the ethics of social media (Parry, 2011) or the dynamics of participation and cooperation (Simon, 2010), are representative of this need to confront new trust-based behavior online. And as much as they might (excitingly) be indicative of a new wave of user-focused—rather than technology-focused—digital heritage writing, so they might also alert us to where a site of tension for the museum online remains.

Alongside this transfiguration of trust-based behavior online comes a series of other challenges related to accuracy on the web. Specifically, this is the issue of differentiating (and preserving) the accurate online. One of the consequences of ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells, 2009, p. 4), is what the British commentator Andrew Keen (2011) has—not uncontroversially—described as the web ‘shattering the world into a billion personalised truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile’ (p. 17). Keen’s diatribe is against what he sees as a ‘shamelessness’ in our ‘filter-free Web 2.0 world’ (Keen, 2011, pp. 3, 81). Keen (2011, p. 27) protests that ‘the cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artists and spin doctor, between art and advertisement, between amateur and expert’. The suggestion is that in such a situation (the situation of the empowered Web 2.0 prosumer), the quality and reliability of the information we receive declines, and that ‘amateurism, rather than expertise, is celebrated, even revered’ (Keen, 2011, p. 37). In later editions of his work, Keen is obliging in presenting to his readers some of the criticisms (including his own self-criticism) of this thesis, namely: favoring traditional mainstream media; overlooking the shortcomings of some broadcasters’ output; not acknowledging the high quality that can be found in the blogosphere; and neglecting the positive catalytic effect that user-generated content has had on mainstream media. Nonetheless, confrontationally, Keen (2011) concludes that, ‘the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information’ (p. 16). Whether we agree with these shortcomings or not (and whether we may go even further, as some have, in suggesting that Keen’s thesis is ‘error ridden, simplistic’ and ‘inaccurate’), his work at least turns our head to the question of what happens to accuracy in the era of Web 2.0 (Keen, 2011, p. xvi). This issue of an increasing quantity of (not always verifiable) information online (Hand 2008, p. 3), demands museums to ask themselves, as Shirky (2008) puts it, ‘[w]hat happens when there’s nothing unique about publishing anymore, because users can do it for themselves’ (pp. 60–61). In short, what happens to institutions such as the museum when there is an information surfeit, and the act of publication is no longer special?

These issues of trust and accuracy have, therefore, remained troublesome for the museum online. The idea of a virtual museum may now be orthodox, and the affiliation between the museum and the web far from remarkable. And yet, as these debates (and their inevitable associated discussions regarding the visit event) have matured and subsided, the rise of the social web and the machine-processable web has brought questions on trustworthiness and accuracy to the fore. There is, however, a third troublesome characteristic of the web (regarding authenticity) that for museums, again, appears to persist. The web still vexes the academy on how (if at all) it can harbor something called the authentic—a nontrivial point for an institution such as the museum for which the framing of authenticity has been quintessential. British museologist David Phillips (1997) expresses this eloquently as the ‘relentless material momentum’ of the apparatus of display (‘the cases and plinths, the hanging systems and practices, the lack of cash to change it all when it comes to installation’), that contrive a tradition of what the culture of the authentic is, and how it is allowed to perpetuate in museums (p. 201). Debates on this subject have extended from whether authenticity on the web is almost impossible to verify (Keen, 2011, p. 25), to whether even the concept of originality itself is anachronistic in the digital age (Hand, 2008, p. 3). In this regard, these ‘unresolved issues of [. . .] authenticity’ (Hand, 2008, p. 1) within digital culture have still not shaken free from earlier generations of critical thinking about new media. Preoccupations and entanglements over an opposition between ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ are testimony to a discourse of media theory still affected by writings from the pre-web era such as that by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. Web content can all too reflexively be viewed through Baudrillard’s prism, the pessimistic implication of which is the online object becoming viewed as a ‘simulation’ and the user confronted with hyperreality—‘a world of self-referential signs’ (Poster, 1988, p. 6). This version of media theory does not allow the online to represent a physical reality. Instead, the digital museum, the ...