At first glance, ‘multi-platform museum’ is a perfectly serviceable term to name the multi-faceted nature of museums’ interactions with audiences today: it makes us think beyond the physical site and suggests the museum’s presence in multiple digital contexts. Plus it has a nice alliterative ring. But for a technologist, ‘multi-platform’ has implications that make another metaphor, the distributed network, a more engaged way to approach 21st century museum outreach across digital and other platforms.
Technically speaking, ‘multi-platform’ implies publishing to many outlets or ‘platforms’ from a single content source. In other words, the aim is to create a direct copy – as perfect a replica as possible – of the same original (content, message) on each platform, or at least control the content and experience centrally. But like any wholesale export of culture without sensitivity to the ‘native’ context and its communities, multi-platform publishing results at best in forcing square pegs into round holes, at worst in a sort of colonizing effort; either way, it ultimately fails. Content designed for one use, context or platform rarely ports directly and easily onto another. Brochures do not make good websites. Texts written for catalogues and wall labels sound stilted and dry as audio guide scripts. And just as physical artifacts have to be photographed or scanned in order to create a digital representation for online use, at a minimum videos and photographs have to be recoded and reformatted to meet the size requirements of social media platforms.
Tailoring content and experiences for each audience and platform, seemingly the alternative to a mass-export approach to content publishing and management, can be prohibitively expensive, especially for reaching niche audiences. As a result, museums often live within their budgets by trying to develop a single, ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution that is intended to serve a ‘broad’ audience but in effect compromises both quality and specificity at the risk of fitting none. Because of its spoke and wheel structure, the multi-platform model does not easily incorporate feedback loops or ways for user-authored content and experiences to get combined with museum content and redistributed without passing through centralized channels, where editors and censors monitor the conversation.
Creating content and messages with a more discursive dynamic and greater sensitivity to the specificity of platforms, audiences and contexts requires a different approach to content and experience design from what is implied by the ‘multiplatform’ metaphor. Instead, we need more flexible, modular structures and methodologies, akin to what a technologist might call a ‘distributed network’ or rhizomic model.
There is no center or panopticon to a distributed network: no Hegelian master or slave. The constituent platforms work together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In terms of content, we speak less of the ‘original’ and more of the ‘simulacrum’ – the copy without an original, about which Jean Baudrillard wrote so eloquently. Notions of authority and hierarchy are not very helpful in describing relationships and processes that work together more like mash-ups than pronouncements. Truth, rather than being disseminated outwards from a center point, is discovered in its intersections and interstices, through the (sometimes surprising) juxtapositions that can happen when experiences are assembled collaboratively along the many-branched paths of a rhizome. In the museum as distributed network, content and experience creation resembles atoms coming together and reforming on new platforms to create new molecules, or ‘choose your own ending’ adventure stories.
The Internet is a distributed network, structured as a rhizome by its military inventors precisely to make it impossible to destroy the entire network through an attack on any single center. In the loosest sense, every time you perform a Google search, you have tapped into a distributed network. The original content that forms the results page – itself a ‘mash-up’ – exists on a number of different computers, physical and virtual, each potentially in its own network or grid. It is delivered to you in an entirely new and personalized context on the basis of your search interests and terms at that precise moment in time; yet the original digital assets are completely untouched in their original form, and you can easily trace the results content back to discover its full context and original publication environment. The value and authority of the ‘original’ is not diminished, but rather enhanced, by being placed in new contexts alongside content from other sources. Quality is determined by the content’s relevance, depth, longevity and quantity of ‘peer-reviews’ and recommendations – also known as links.
Other than the Internet itself, distributed networks don’t really exist yet in the technical sense, because most computer systems are built on the master-slave model. But we do see the products of master-slave systems being distributed, e.g. in peer-to-peer gaming, social media environments, and some wikis. As we begin to design interpretation and information systems for the museum in the age of social media, the distributed network can serve as an inspirational metaphor to describe new ways of authoring and supporting museum experiences that are:
• conversational rather than unilateral,
• engaging rather than simply didactic,
• generative of content and open-ended
rather than finite and closed
…and that become ‘smarter’, more effective and useful the more they are used.
Like the Internet, the Museum as Distributed Network is enhanced, not diluted, by multiple voices and authors. But it requires powerful tools for making the ever-increasing data and metadata of assets, interpretations and interpreters findable, and for connecting communities of interest in meaningful ways across oceans of content and contributors. Here is one vision of how a distributed network approach can be deployed to foster and support mobile experiences of the museum both on-site and beyond.
From headphones to microphones: Mobile experience design for the museum as distributed network.
Audio tours are the oldest and most common form of ‘self-guided’ mobile experience in museums and cultural sites. The traditional development model began with the question, “What are the most important messages we want visitors to take away” from the encounter with this collection, exhibition or object – and content was developed to support those goals.
As the audio tour platform evolved from analog tapes to digital media players, the devices that could deliver the mobile experience proliferated. Today not just audio tours but mobile multimedia, including text, video and interactive content, can be delivered to the visitor’s own devices as well as those provided on-site by the museum. In a multi-platform museum, the traditional audio tour content is repurposed and published to these new devices: cellphones, personal media players like iPods, and web-enabled phones, as both mobile websites and native applications. Especially with some planning ahead with cross-platform content design and minor versioning for the different delivery platforms, this is not a bad strategy: museums should seek to ‘meet our audiences where they are’ by publishing their content in as many places as possible.
As Koven Smith has asked, however, will delivering what is fundamentally the same, narrow-cast tour experience to shiny new gadgets really ‘take them some place new?’ Will adding images, or video, or a sexy new consumer device really improve the take-up or penetration rates of mobile technology use by museum visitors? Although in conflict with visitors’ self-reported usage of mobile interpretation in museums, in reality the audio tour reaches a sobering minority of the museum’s on-site audience, and one has to ask how well podcasts, cellphone tours and iPhone apps serving up the same basic content fulfill the needs of those audiences who’ll never be able to visit the museum in person. And yet what museum has the resources to develop content and experiences that will suit the full range of its audiences on all the mobile platforms, using a spoke-and-wheel design and distribution approach?
A distributed network design offers a more sustainable model for building mobile experiences that are also more responsive, meaningful and relevant to different audiences and their interests. Employing the principle that the best way to learn is to teach, it turns visitors into docents and ambassadors for our museums by taking the mobile experience from headphones to microphones, “from we do the talking to we help you do the talking.”
In the next issue, we’ll look at the major ingredients for this new kind of mobile solution: an ‘un-tour’ that begins with asking what audiences want to know about our collections, exhibitions, research and scholarship (both on-site and beyond the museum’s wall) – not with what we want to tell them. By responding first to the questions that visitors ask of the museum, we are able to use mobile solutions to engage them more fully and immediately: to truly “meet them where they are and then take them some place new” – to deeper levels of experience and understanding. Most importantly, we can help connect communities of interest and facilitate conversations among our audiences as well as with the museum itself. By playing to the museum’s strengths in providing niche content and expertise, mobile social media has the potential to stimulate the wonder and the passion of the direct encounter with the physical museum for audiences using mobile platforms both on-site and beyond.
Nancy Proctor, Head of New Media,
Smithsonian American Art Museum
* image by way of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's flickr photostream
