“I’m not upset about the audience getting more power. But I’m worried about the very weird way in which we can hear them, and the way it’s mediated by social platforms that have their own very messed-up incentives.”
Culture for All
Slides from my keynote for the Prague Platform on the Future of Cultural Heritage, convened by the European Commission, October 7-8, 2019.
The Prague Platform talks about “Enhanced digitally enabled cultural heritage participation for all citizens.”
But what do these words mean? And how might we approach them — as practitioners, communities, governments and institutions, and citizens?
17 examples of museum-ish social media for Alexandra Korey
Alexandra - - here are some thoughts re: your question about examples of museum social media. (Posted here for easier sharing/linking and in case someone else was interested.)
Not a comprehensive list and not exclusively 2016, but perhaps useful/provocative. Note that I’m mostly interested in (and focusing on) examples that come from outside museums themselves.
1. Re: participation at scale, across the whole sector - - #askacurator, @museumselfieday, #ilovemuseums - - via @mardixon (and see museumselfie info/paper here by Alli Burness http://museumselfies.tumblr.com/)
2. Re: giving control of the brand/trust relationship to users. @sweden - - http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-pleasing-irreverence-of-sweden
3. Re: Civics/Governance in public institutions (demonstrating what is possible), “The Spanish Town That Runs On Twitter” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/technology/the-spanish-town-that-runs-on-twitter.html
4. Re: opening up to public interest in science, process, inquiry - - How to Tweet Like a Robot on Mars - - http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/how-to-tweet-like-a-robot-on-mars/381114/
5. Re: the relationship between global/local and not taking oneself too seriously, Orkney Library - - https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/real-talk-who-doesnt-dress-as-whitesnake-once-a-week [Note: Tumblr thinks the link is spam or evil, but it’s not, and it’s a good article. Copy/paste the URL into your browser.]
6. Re: cross-sector movement by museum staff - - #museumsRespondToFerguson. https://twitter.com/hashtag/museumsrespondtoFerguson?src=hash
7. Re: unusual and engaging telling of history - - @ReliveApollo11, real-time tweeting of ground/mission communication transcripts from original Apollo moon mission, from National Air and Space Museum (and in particular the numerous and poignant replies from the public)
8. Re: beautiful and surprising concepts, though not *exactly* social media, “Birdwatching” at the Rijksmuseum - - a meetup of birdwatching enthusiasts to tag/catalog images of birds in the Rijks collections. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/vogelen and http://www.wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/research/wude/digital-birdwatching-at-the-rijksmuseum/
9. Re: working with communities - - the beautiful way that Dr Meghan Ferriter supports and encourages the Smithsonian Transcription Center community.
10. Re: museum collections speaking for themselves: Museum Bots - - https://twitter.com/backspace/lists/museum-bots/members
11. Re: initiatives supported by users/fans on their own - - #bookstagram on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/bookstagram/?hl=en and http://bookriot.com/2013/06/07/a-brief-guide-to-bookstagram/
12. And Instagram in general…
13. And YouTube in general…
14: Re: Collecting/curating *outside* of official channels. Pinterest - - https://www.pinterest.com/search/?q=museum&referrer=sitelinks_searchbox
15. Re: soliciting stories/content from the public, The Museum of Broken Relationships. https://brokenships.com/
16. Re: artists speaking for themselves - - @aiww - - the artist on Twitter. “Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.” (A little more on http://usingdata.tumblr.com/post/88281521008/twitter-is-the-peoples-tool-the-tool-of-the)
17. …And an enormous shoutout/kudos to all the museums out there who are just being good - - good to their audiences and communities - - on social media. It’s not a sexy story, but it’s a great one, and maybe the one that matters the most.
The supplicants were far away
“The first thing he noticed when he arrived at Rockefeller was a strange sense of calm. There was a slow deliberateness to the way things moved that he wasn’t used to—there was no sense of urgency. There was no sense of urgency, he gradually realized, because the people at Rockefeller had no one to answer to. On Wall Street, he always had clients breathing down his neck, and at Abyssinian there were always people lining up in the office who needed his help that very minute. But at Rockefeller the people who needed help were far away—distant supplicants who communicated through applications and waited months for an answer. The supplicants had no right to demand anything—they took what they could get and were grateful for it.”