Abstract
We are all used to attending to visual and sound media in museums. This has been happening for a good while now, and in most cases, it enhances the experience, as, for example, in the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, where in the section called ‘Old Ways, New Ways’ there is ‘a permanent interactive exhibit where kids (and adults, if they’re game) can learn to play a drum under the videotaped tutelage of a Kiowa elder, and use a computer to design a Navajo rug’ (Kingsolver, 1997: 150). Social media are another matter and seem far more recent. That is the cue for this edited collection, which is concerned with the ways in which social media are used in museums or in relation to museums, how museums forge certain kinds of social connection through the use of social media and how such media are changing the organisation of museums along with their associated practices. What opportunities do such media provide, and what obstacles do they present? The book operates with a broad definition of social media, seeing them all as facilitating open interaction and exchange between users. This has obvious implications for old-style, top-down, unilateral models of the transmission of knowledge by museums, moving them towards more interactive communication processes, and for museum sites themselves, moving them out from their actual physical spaces. The chapters in the book, all of which are oriented towards users/visitors/audiences, are divided into three sections. The first part is focused on the curation or co-creation dilemma, and with this whether they opt for authority or playfulness, authentic or surrogate experiences, the real or the virtual, and information or entertainment. The second section explores the dilemma of iterative design as opposed to close collaboration between researchers and museum curators and designers, while the final part attends to creative digital strategies for handling the dilemmas of institutional control versus visitor empowerment, and learning versus entertainment. This valuable collection of 11 research articles, deriving from a 2010 symposium in Denmark, shows the various ways in which the connected museum uses and takes advantage of digital and social media, in countries as diverse as Germany, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. While it will obviously be of great interest to museum professionals, it contains much that will absorb anyone interested in museums and heritage cultures.