Engaging with Social Media in Museums

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Comment by Robin Boast on July 15, 2009 at 7:34pm

Dear Sophie,

I truly wish that more people understood this simple truth. We forget, or rather we are lead to forget, that the technology of the Web is rather old and very simple. Packet switching, the backbone of web communication, has been around since the early 1960s, and HTML since the early 1990s. Even such high end development environments for the web, such as flash, have been around since the mid-1990s.

Of course longevity doesn't equate with simplicity, but you simply have to look at the oodles of powerful, well designed and useful web apps that are being created every day, often by loose consortiums of open source programmers or even individual programmers, to see that it may be skilled and fiddly, but not as complicated as we are led to believe.

I think that this reversal of complexity – that technology is very very hard and knowledge is relatively easy – is intentional. If we all believe that information and knowledge is simply out there, and all it needs are really specialist technocrats to order and make it useful, then we are always indebted to the technocrats. They run the show, as do their definitions and orders of knowledge.

What really matters, and what is really difficult, is knowledge and understanding. This takes time, commitment, negotiation and individual skill. It is also something that is constantly shifting and renegotiated, something that is local and situated in knowledge communities. It is not a commodity that needs good systems to make it useful. That is what technology is.

Many thanks for raising this important issue.

Comment by Sophie Lieberman on July 15, 2009 at 1:55pm

One of the things that I do in my job is sit on the NSW National Science Week Committee. This year – inspired by our very own Lynda Kelly – I have been heading up a social networking subcommittee to engage people with National Science Week. The blog is about to launch and we are looking for content and connections (10daysofscience@gmail.com)

What has been interesting for me in this project is that the things I thought would be hard - finding a platform, technology etc... have been relatively easy (and free of charge). Conversely, the things I thought would be easy - deciding on content, creating community, have been really tricky.

It is still early days for http://www.scienceweek.gov.au/YourState/NSW/Pages/default.aspx but at this stage my strongest feeling is that there is no such thing as a spontaneity in the successful use of social media. Once more I am realising (and maybe I'm slow) that this is a resource intensive medium that requires the allocation of the same to be successful....

Comment by Sophie Lieberman on April 16, 2009 at 11:49am

Hi Angelina

I've started a ning site for science communication and social media as a part of my role on the NSW National Science Committee - we are strategising for 2009 and beyond and I wondered if you would be happy to share the slides from the workshop you ran at the AM on the topic? It would be really useful as a starting point to crystalise our ideas (with a very short time frame)?

Hope this finds you well
S

Comment by Robin Boast on March 30, 2009 at 11:04pm

Some might be interested in the new Social Documentation System that the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge is releasing next month. It is open-source and allows outside experts to document objects under their own login.

Comment by Lynda Kelly on September 14, 2008 at 8:59am

An interesting o/view of web use in Australia found via Mal - The Internet in Australia

Comment by Angelina Russo on April 14, 2008 at 1:37pm

Hi Sophie
Yes! We've been cooking up ideas for using the Engaging with Social Media research project to get things moving. It will be great to chat about this once we're all back in the country!
Cheers

Comment by Sophie Lieberman on April 13, 2008 at 11:43am

Hi Angelina, I've been following Lynda K's travels and reading papers at mw2008. It's all very invigorating and I am plotting (more) ways with Lynda to put some of these 'discoveries' into practice.
Look foward to seeing more of all of it.Best S

Comment by Lynda Kelly on April 12, 2008 at 2:03am

Had an interesting discussion at the MW2008 roundtable this am about research process and lessons learned