You’ll probably have heard a lot of chat about Web 2.0 over the past twelve months. The phrase refers to a perceived second generation of websites, one where the users are not just spectators browsing information created for them, but can participate by creating, sharing and curating content.
Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword. Websites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have rapidly become some of the most popular destinations on the web. Many museums are using these popular websites as a marketing tool, reaching out to the young people who use them in search of the next generation of museum visitor.
More significant though is the changing expectation that Web 2.0 has created. The next generation of museum visitors are no longer happy to just consume content curated for them by experts; they want a museum experience that is relevant to them and their interests. This approach has been dubbed ‘Generation C’ – the generation who want to create their own content. For the museum sector, it would be more relevant to call them Generation Curator – they want to be the Curator.
This desire to create, curate and share has led millions of young people to build their own webpages on MySpace and Facebook to share pictures, music and film and with friends. While much is said about the social network and the desire of these people to be hyper-connected, the time that these individuals spend ‘curating’ their online space is often overlooked. It has become a new hobby and a seriously-considered creative outlet.
Museums are well-placed to appeal to ‘Generation Curator’ because they offer rich experiences which can be virtually ‘cut-up’ and stuck back together online in numerous different ways to reflect the individual taste of each participant.
Remixing, reinterpreting and sharing interesting content is the kind of engaging interaction that draws young people to sites like Bebo, and to really reach this target group, museums need to look beyond using social networks for marketing and embrace this ‘everyone is a curator’ culture both online and offline.
While the idea of ‘Generation Curator’ might appeal to young people, this cult of the amateur raises an important question for museums about their role as trusted experts and how this can be balanced against the creative output of the masses. Though the Web 2.0 culture is one in which everyone can curate content, this does not replace professional curators nor the position of the museum as experts, but instead sits alongside professional content to compliment it where appropriate.
One example of this comes from N8, a Dutch organisation which aims to get young people from the Amsterdam area to visit museums. In 2007 they asked members of the public to create their own audio commentaries about items found in the venues around the city. Audio commentaries about artworks found in prestigious collections may not seem like the most appropriate place to ask for public involvement, these are normally written by trusted experts and listeners expect these guides to be factually correct.
But the audio commentaries created by the public for N8 do not pretend to be by trusted experts; these are something different and additional, as Juha van ‘t Zelfde, music curator for N8 explains, “We think that audio guides created by members of the public have an inviting effect. Rather than beginning with the formal, official explanation, young people can now start with something different, perhaps something that is more appealing to them. They can always decide to listen to the formal audio guide at the museum. But to get their attention and to trigger their imagination, employing this strategy seems viable.”
Each artwork could have several audio commentaries, each from a different vantage point. All have created by museum visitors who have been inspired to take the time to create, curate and share.
In Newcastle, England, a gallery has taken participation one step further. As part of their exhibition LOVE, the Laing Art Gallery asked members of the public to not just comment on artworks in their collection, but to create a new one. The artwork, developed with Yoko Ono, is made up of hundred of ‘messages of love’ sent to the gallery through the exhibition website. The artwork was exhibited alongside paintings by artists such as Goya, Rossetti and Hockney. The gallery used photo sharing website Flickr to show the artwork as it grew, which also allowed the public to interact with the exhibition by adding comments. The LOVE website also enabled users to become a virtual curator and pick artworks from the gallery’s collection to form their own personal exhibition and to share their creation with friends.
The Love exhibition took the creative and social elements which attract ’Generation C’ to social networks and used them to turn visitors to the gallery in to participants, complimenting the work of the artists in the exhibition and resulting in a more engaging interaction.
One area in which museums have traditionally collaborated with members of the public is social history, and Web 2.0 gives us new tools to allow the public to participate quickly and easily.
The Sixties is a new exhibition at York Castle Museum, a venue in the North of England. The curators realised that many visitors would have memories and photographs from that decade which could add something to the exhibition. They decided to use their website not only as a promotional tool, but also to give the public the opportunity to participate.
The exhibition website asks the public to add memories and upload pictures relating to the 1960s. These are then displayed online and also downloaded by curators and displayed on digital screens in the exhibition. This visitor-generated content compliments the main exhibition, allowing ordinary members of the public to share their experiences alongside accurate historic and cataloguing information created by the venue’s professional curators.
This alone provokes another interesting modern issue for museums. The Museums Association was recently highlighting the plethora of objects many museums now have, and counting, particularly social history items such as product packaging. As the same starts to happen with a volume of visitor-generated content, does this need to be edited and catalogued by professional Curators in the same way as their collections before we become inundated? Is it all relevant, good and bad, as a pertinent record of modern times and Web 2.0’s place in history?
London’s Tate Modern answered this with a tactical compromise. In 2006, they launched ‘Tate Tracks’, a soundtrack to pieces from their collection. Professional musicians were invited to find a piece in the museum’s collection which inspired them and write a track about it. These pieces of music by bands such as The Chemical Brothers, Klaxons and Basement Jaxx could be listened to on the Tate website or through headphones next to the piece in the Gallery. Once twelve tracks had been composed, Tate Modern used its presence on MySpace to launch a search only for the thirteenth track. They invited unsigned musicians aged 16 – 24 to create a piece of music inspired by a work of art in Tate Modern. The partnership with MySpace exposed millions of users to the Tate brand and used the social networking site in an innovative way to ask young people to step beyond being just visitors. John Stack, Head of Tate Online, explains ‘we use social networks, because that is where the people are, and if we approach them in the right way with projects for music lovers or those with an interest in photography, it lets us reach those people’.
Another example of the Tate strategically springboarding existing social networks to reach out to the public was their innovative use of photo sharing website Flickr for their 2007 exhibition ‘How We Are Now’. Tate Britian used Flickr to invite members of the public to contribute photographs which illustrated one of the four themes: portrait, landscape, still life or documentary. Over 6,000 images were entered through Flickr by over 3,000 individuals, of these 40 photographs where selected to be exhibited alongside work by William Henry Fox Talbot, Tom Hunter and David Bailey. As well as the 40 images selected to be part of the exhibition, all the entries were shown on screens in the gallery, giving anyone who participated the opportunity to see their work on display in Tate Britian.
This was the first time that Tate had invited members of the public to contribute to an exhibition, and it attracted a big response. John Stack attributes the success of the project to ‘taking time to understand the Flickr and its users and not just using the space to push the Tate brand’.
Through personalised Web 2.0 pages, blogs and networks, Generation C are creating their own ‘environment’ online, each asserting their place in society and stating their view on what’s important. These ‘life casts’ could be considered a modern day source of social history – the memoirs of today. They also form a new mode of word-of-mouth marketing since it has been shown that the opinions and reviews expressed are often trusted more than those from magazines and newspapers because they come from like-minded people – which is evident since everyone’s credentials are proudly displayed. To encourage these young people to write about their museum experience, venues need not necessarily offer incentives – no more than the promise of being included and on display – but they do need to take down barriers to doing so. This may include giving access whereever possible for members of the public to take photographs for non-commercial purposes. Current protocol makes this particularly difficult but, as we have seen with iTunes, and are likely to with catchuptv.com, if consumers want access to a medium, the rights holders have to get in step with them to find a satisfactory compromise and not vice versa.
Many of those reading this article will already have a presence on sites like MySpace and Flickr, but it is not enough to just be there; in order to stay connected with the museum visitors of the future, museums need to look at ways to use these networks to give individuals an opportunity to create, curate and share content. This need not be a shift in approach, just an extension of existing community liaisons, visitor feedback and creative museum management. It involves using resources wisely, targeting specific groups and being open-minded. These values are all part of any modern, successful museum, they just need to be protracted and evolved to reach the changing expectations of ‘Generation C’.
