The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication

Kirsten Drotner, Vince Dziekan, Ross Parry, Kim Christian Schrøder, Kirsten Drotner, Vince Dziekan, Ross Parry, Kim Christian Schrøder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138676305
• eBook ISBN: 9781317197430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Business

Museums today find themselves within a mediatised society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology-rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatised: they present a uniquely media-centred environment, in which communicative media is a constitutive property of their organisation and of the visitor experience. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitising lens for media-related museum practice on the ground.

Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments.

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication will appeal to both students and scholars, as well as to practitioners involved in the visioning, design and delivery of mediated communication in the museum. It teaches us not just how to study museums, but how to go about being a museum in today's world.

The book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has beenmade available under a a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Part I

Foundations

K. Drotner, V. Dziekan, R. Parry and K. C. Schrøder

Today, any potential visitor to a museum soon realises that engaging with museums means interacting with a wide range of communication media: from online information about visiting hours, special exhibitions and transport facilities, on to invitations to follow the museum on social network sites (“social media”). Actual museum visitors also meet a variety of media in the form of printed leaflets and catalogues, information screens and possibly mobile options for online interaction along the way. Many museums are also keenly aware of the importance to communicate a clear public profile in a competitive cultural environment where many vie for the attention of visitors, politicians and funders. Behind the scenes, mediated modes of communication equally orchestrate museum professionals’ daily work, be it content management systems for collections, archival infrastructures or printed newsletters to the staff.

This part offers an introduction to understanding how mediated communication has always been fundamental to the ways in which museums organise their internal as well as external relations. Perhaps because the emergence of media technologies and media applications have proliferated with accelerating speed in the last three decades, museums’ professional engagement with media is often considered to be a fairly recent phenomenon. This assumption is indicative of the dilemmas and challenges that are taken up and analysed in this first part of the Handbook.

The contributors set museums’ mediated communication within a historical perspective in order to trace the continuities and the possible changes in museums’ interactions with their surroundings. In so doing, they stress the importance of avoiding two pitfalls in studying museums’ relations with media. One is what some historians term “presentism” (Fischer, 1970), that is, a tendency to use the present as an analytical prism through which the past is simply refracted. Such a view on the past tends to minimise historical difference and distance. It obscures media technologies and appropriations that differ from what we know in today’s deeply mediatised environment; or it minimises museums’ organisational or legal arrangements that do not resonate with contemporary priorities or values. The other pitfall is to underestimate the fact that historical “distance is not simply given, but is also constructed” (Phillips, 2004, p. 89). Viewing the past as simply reflecting the passage of time tends to disregard that the viewer holds particular forms of engagements with past themes and issues. The past is about something for someone also when it comes to museums’ mediated modes of communication. So, historians invariably make choices and position themselves when studying media in past museum environments.

Balancing these two pitfalls, the contributors endorse and document the formative role played by media in museums through history. Their detailed and often case-based chapters serve to nuance binary and normative narratives of media as levers of either innovation, immersion and visitor agency and engagement; or, conversely, as levers of Disneyfication, marketisation of public communication and a diminishing of the auratic qualities of museum objects.

The five chapters were selected in order to display some of the key approaches to studying museums’ media environments in a historical context. In their accounts, the authors range widely across theoretical conceptions and temporal perspectives, from a mainly deconstructionist view on museums as media environments in a long historical view (Anders Ekströ m, Peter Samis) to a mainly personal focus on practices of digital appropriation since the 1990s (Samis). They also vary in their professional background (ICT studies, media studies, history of science, museum history), thus testifying to the often interdisciplinary range necessary to study museums’ mediated communication.

Taken together, the chapters in this first part take up a number of key questions and debates of relevance for anyone wishing to understand museums’ mediated communication from a time-based perspective. The first question concerns the very notion of media. Should media be defined and studied as particular material technologies conveying various forms of information across time? Or, are media rather to be understood as symbolic meaning-making processes circulating across various spaces, including the museum? Historians of technology tend to favour the former definition and focus on the formative roles played by the introduction of new technologies for institutions, infrastructures and legal arrangements (Winston, 1998). Media and communication historians are often more attuned to the latter definition and focus on the changing substance of communication and its societal and personal impact (Thompson, 1995). The authors in this part offer differing answers, ranging from Samis’ technological stand in unpacking the organisational implications of museum digitisation since the 1990s to Susan Anderson’s mapping of audiences’ changing meaning-making practices. Both Anderson and Bodil Axelsson push familiar definitions of media. Reflexively, they insist that digital data and algorithms now produced by museum professionals and visitors alike serve as hidden infrastructures of power held by actors in the commercial domain well beyond the familiar binary understandings of media as material technologies or as symbolic meaning-making processes.

The second question concerns which aspects in the communicative flow are central in order to understand museums’ mediated communication across time. Should studies be concerned with the professional design, production and organisation of mediated communication? Or should we ask questions about the ways in which mediated modes of communication are taken up, represented and understood by people interacting with the museum? While most scholars in principle favour an inclusive approach that encompasses both a museum professional (or “sender”) perspective and a people (or “receiver”) perspective, most historical studies in practice focus on one of these perspectives. These choices have implications for how continuity and change are accounted for.

As noted, choices are key to any historical study. But more important in the present context, the choices made materialise as different temporal arrangements when studying mediated museum communication across time from either a professional or a people perspective. At least since the advent of modern museums in the 18th century, a professional perspective on mediated museum communication in a time-based perspective will often involve institutional, legal and political contexts where change takes a good deal of time to take effect. For while political decisions to cut museum funding or major private donations are examples of sudden changes, the implications of these events on how museums may change their professional perspective on mediated communication are rarely as immediate. So, continuities will tend to figure more clearly than change when adopting a professional perspective on historical trajectories in mediated museum communication. As Axelsson (this part) notes: “The agency of display has not necessarily been reformed in its entirety” with museums’ introduction of online databases that are seemingly more user-led. A people (or “receiver”) perspective on mediated museum communication will often be concerned with individual or social contexts of appropriation, be it shifts in mediated communication as part of exhibition spaces or media ensembles beyond the museum walls. Such contexts more easily lend themselves to studying change, since shifts in individual or social behaviour, perception or practice are more perceptible than are shifts in, for example, organisational procedures. So, Ekströ m (this part), in his incisive chapter on late19th- and early 20th-century world fairs and exhibitions as precursors of the modern museum, notes how these public spaces engendered a novel “embodied politics of participation, shaped in the interaction between the audiences and the displays as well as particular media.”

A third key question illuminated by the chapters in this part is how to understand the entanglements of interpersonal and mediated modes of communication, and how museums have practiced and developed these entanglements. While media have always been central to museum communication, as noted above, many museums harbour an understanding that the “mother” and model of communication in museums is interpersonal communication in the physical museum where visitors meet professional guides and curators or where they take part in events or learning processes involving speakers, performers or interaction with teachers. Such an understanding easily leads to a definition of mediated communication as processes taking place beyond the museum walls – an add-on to, or even an aberration from, the “real thing” of immediate, interpersonal communication and interaction. Thus, museums may downplay a development of mediated communication and favour direct interaction with visitors; or, they may attempt to use media as tools to innovate modes of communication in the physical museum that are perceived to be outmoded.

Chapters in this part document how actual museum developments have repeatedly disproved this binary understanding of mediated and interpersonal communication. Mediated communication is very much part of innovation in the material museum space (Samis, Peter Pavement); interpersonal modes of communication are involved when museums have entered public spaces such as fairgrounds and markets (Ekströ m). The large-scale uptake around the world of social network sites serves to further the nesting of interpersonal and mediated communication. In empirical terms, this development has radical implications for professional curating practices (Axelsson). In theoretical terms, scholars and practitioners need to rethink prevalent definitions of visitors and audiences (Anderson), and they need to develop more encompassing and dynamic means of capturing people’s meaning-making practices at museums.

Taken together, the chapters in this part point to the continued relevance of analysing and understanding museums’ mediated communication from a time-based perspective. Such a perspective illuminates the fallacy of current trends to equate mediated communication with digital technologies, with institutional branding efforts or with people’s participatory practices. The empirical cases analysed in this part serve as robust reminders that media have always been integral to the ways in which museums are developed, understood and practiced. Indeed, the authors’ inclusive understanding of mediated museum communication invites us to reflect on the very definition of museums as more than simply material settings defined through their handling of objects. Museums are also institutionalised catalysts of societal interaction; they are meeting-grounds of understanding and misunderstanding with media as midwives.

References

Fischer, D. H. (1970). Historians’ fallacies: Toward a logic of historical thought. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks.

Phillips, M. S. (2004). History, memory and historical consciousness. In P. Seixas (Ed.), Theorizing historical consciousness (pp. 86–102). Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Thompson, J. B. (1995). The media and modernity: A social history of the media. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Winston, B. (1998). Media, technology and society: A history: From the telegraph to the Internet. London, UK: Routledge.

I.1

Walk-in media

International exhibitions as media space¹

Anders Ekströ m

In opening his seminal essay on “the exhibitionary complex” – which was first published in the journal New Formations in 1988 and later reprinted in The Birth of the Museum (1995) – Tony Bennett emphasises that the modern museum was shaped in the context of a diversity of 19th-century exhibitionary practices, including dioramas and panoramas, national and international exhibitions, arcades and department stores (Bennett, 1988; Bennett, 1995, p. 59). Starting fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Media, mediatisation and museums: A new ensemble
• PART I Foundations
• PART II Environments
• PART III Practices
• PART IV Incident(al) readings
• PART V Directions
• Index