Democratising the Museum. Reflections on Participatory Technologies

Pille Runnel/Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt (eds.), Democratising the Museum: Reflections on Participatory Technologies, Peter Lang, 2014. 240pp. ISBN-10: 3631649169.

This article aims to analyse the notion of participation in the museum context using an audience studies perspective. Museums are increasingly competing for the attention of the public in the arenas of leisure and education, the process of which is part of the commercialisation of the museum institution. In addition, a turn towards interactivity is taking place in museums, and while that might serve well to revitalise the museum and bring it closer to its audiences, it does not sufficiently support realisation of the change of the museum institution into a laboratory-type museum (de Varine, 1988, van Mensch, 2005) -a concept defined through the communicative and democratic aspects of the museum. As is the case with many public institutions, the democratisation of society is increasing the need for transparency and accountability, which in turn has brought public engagement to the attention of the museum. According to , museums need to find a balance between the activities of the museum and audiences: the (potential) need to overcome the shyness of expertise combined with the need to organise the (potential) flood of amateurs.

In last decades cultural heritage institutions have become more open than ever and they have entering to the arena of civic education and engagement practices. Everyday hundreds of museums are asking from their self how to find and bring new and numerous visitors to museum and how to include new individuals and communities to the museum in sustainable way? These questions mean to analyze subjects as --communication and cultural participation, which are related nowadays to the new technologies and new media. Estonian museums are currently part of the "first wave" in using information and communication technologies (ICTs): they are mostly related to the digitalization of their collections, and to the provision of digital information in web. There are different degrees of optimism in museums, on hoping, how digitalisation will help to fulfil the basic functions. Some museums have chosen the way, where the needs of the users have been putting to the primary place, in choosing what and how to digitalise and how to bring users to create content into the museum. Creative activities of the internet users, like generating content in the museums, are potentially also linked to democratic participation in the public sphere of society, although the connections are not direct. When we consider democracy beyond the traditional understanding of participating in political activities (voting, protesting or signing petitions) we see two important aspects. First, public and civic institutions in general have recently begun to perceive pressure to become more open and democratic. And second, the more the public is involved in any institutionalised aspects of our society, the more democratic the society is. Citizenship, by giving voice to a diversity of concerns, seeks to modify the identities of those participating within a common dialogue (Mouffe, 1993 via Stevenson, 2007. I am considering participatory practices as part of general democratic practices, and considering information and communication technologies as the new opportunity to find additional ways in involving people to the heritage institutions and to the society. In the paper I will start with the discussion of how democracy and participation in the heritage institution meet in the notion of cultural citizenship. Then I will give an overview of the Estonian context mostly to argue that although I use examples of Estonian memory institutions I still consider the examples general enough to be used for discussing participation and user--generated content in the heritage institutions. Next I analyse the internet users, their willingness to contribute content online, and also their expectations to the heritage institution's online sites. I will close the article with some examples as to how a user--centred approach can foster participation.

This article* will analyse the many challenges that creating, storing and using digital heritage has brought to the memory institutions and their professionals. We look at the interrelationship between the potential users of the museum collections, the collections themselves and information and communication technologies as intermediaries to these relations. by analysing survey data, we look at the average Internet user in order to find out who could be the current and future users of the online collections. In addition that, we analyse interviews conducted with 12 members of different Estonian memory institutions in order to understand their perspective on online cultural heritage. Third empirical pillar of the article comes from the two focus group interviews to understand what are users percieved needs for the digital cultural heritage. The data will be analysed through three key functions of the memory institutions in order to understand how digitisation helps with preservation, opening access to the collections and inviting audiences to become active participants and increasing their involvement with cultural heritage.

The special journal issue ‘Interrogating audiences: Theoretical horizons of participation’, edited by Nico Carpentier & Peter Dahlgren has just been published in the academic journal CM (Communication Management Quarterly). This peer-reviewed special issue aims to contribute to the development of participatory theory within the framework of communication and media studies. As always, this requires careful manoeuvring to reconcile conceptual contingency with the necessary fixity that protects the concept of participation from signifying anything and everything. In order to deepen the theorisations of participation, two strategies have been used in this special issue: In a first cluster of articles, the concept of participation will be confronted with another theoretical concept or tradition that will enrich the theoretical development of participation. In the second cluster of articles, the workings of the notion of participation will be analysed within a specific topical field, which will allow deepening participatory theory by confronting participation with the contextualised logics of that topical field. The theoretical work captured in the articles of this special issue originates from the Working Group on “Audience interactivity and participation” of the COST Action “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies” (TATS), which is financed from 2010-2014. The main objective of the TATS COST Action is to advance state-of-the-art knowledge of the key transformations of European audiences within a changing media and communication environment, identifying their interrelationships with the social, cultural and political areas of European societies. This COST Action comprises more than 230 scholars from 30 countries. Its Working Group on “Audience interactivity and participation” focuses on the possibilities and constraints of mediated public participation; the roles that old and new media institutions and professionals (including journalists) play in facilitating public participation and in building citizenship; the interlocking of mainstream media and non-mainstream media and their production of new hybrid organisational structures and audience practices. Table of contents Interrogating audiences: Theoretical horizons of participation CM Communication Management Quarterly, 21, 2011 ISSN 1452-7405 Introduction: Interrogating audiences – Theoretical horizons of participation Nico Carpentier and Peter Dahlgren The concept of participation. If they have access and interact, do they really participate? Nico Carpentier Social capital: Between interaction and participation Manuel José Damásio Applying genre theory to citizen participation in public policy making: Theoretical perspectives on participatory genres Marie Dufrasne and Geoffroy Patriarche Parameters of online participation: Conceptualising civic contingencies Peter Dahlgren Competing by participation – A winning marketing tool Nóra Nyirő, Tamás Csordás and Dóra Horváth Mediated public voices need theory to be heard Nurçay Türkoğlu When the museum becomes the message for participating audiences Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Pille Runnel A critical analysis of two audience prototypes and their participatory dimensions Miroljub Radojković and Ana Milojević The participatory turn in the publishing industry: Rhetorics and practices Francesca Pasquali Abstracts Introduction: Interrogating audiences – Theoretical horizons of participation Nico Carpentier and Peter Dahlgren No abstract available The concept of participation. If they have access and interact, do they really participate? Nico Carpentier Summary: Participation is a concept that is being used in a wide variety of fields, and that has obtained an evenly wide range of meanings. This article attempts first to ground participation in democratic theory, which allows introducing the distinction between minimalist and maximalist forms of participation. In the second part of the article, a broad definition of the political will be used to transcend to logics of institutionalized politics, and to emphasize that the distribution of power in society is a dimension of the social that permeates every possible societal field. Both discussions are used to describe the key characteristics of participation, and to increase the concept’s theoretical foundation. The article then zooms in on one of these characteristics, namely the difference between access, interaction and participation, as this distinction allows further sharpening the key meanings attributed to participation as a political process where the actors involved in decision-making processes are positioned towards each other through power relationships that are (to an extent) egalitarian. Social capital: Between interaction and participation Manuel José Damásio Summary: The purpose of this article is to discuss different ways of conceptualizing social capital in order to bring out the contested and multidimensional character of the concept and relate that with both social interaction and participation in the context of media and network technologies use and consumption. Throughout its history the media have always included a mix of centralized practices and interpersonal communication processes that shape different patterns of relationship between subjects and technologies and generate different social outcomes. The emergence of the communication and networks paradigm as central to the processes of social interaction and community building, invites us to look closely at the mechanisms that individuals use in order to interact and participate in the social networks in which they move themselves. Social capital is one of such mechanisms, a multidimensional concept with different dimensions and features. We discuss social capital’s complementary and sometimes antagonistic dimensions in relation with subjective forms of participation and interaction with and via the media. Finally, we will also tap into the different constructs that social capital allows for and exploit their potential for the argument around network media potential to generate original forms of interaction and participation. Applying genre theory to citizen participation in public policy making: Theoretical perspectives on participatory genres Marie Dufrasne and Geoffroy Patriarche Summary: This research is aimed at constructing a theoretical framework for the study of citizen participation in public policy making, based on genre theory. Drawing on various approaches to genre (rhetorical analysis, literary analysis, sociolinguistics, media studies, organisational communication, user interface design, and computermediated communication), this paper suggests a series of theoretical perspectives on participatory genres, a notion freely borrowed from Erickson (1997) and applied to the methods, activities or applications of citizen participation in public policy making (e.g. consultations, petitions, citizens panels, opinion polls). The proposed theoretical framework takes into account the contexts of participation (conceived as both situations and communities) as well as the interrelationships between participatory genres, and focuses on the repertoires of elements (Lacey, 2000) that characterize participatory genres in terms of ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘who/m’, when’ and ‘where’ (Orlikowski & Yates, 1998). It is argued that approaching citizen participation in public policy making through the lens of participatory genres is valuable to both researchers and practitioners. Parameters of online participation: Conceptualising civic contingencies Peter Dahlgren Summary: The new online media obviously offer very impressive opportunities for participation. Yet, we need to specify more carefully what we mean by participation, and try to illuminate its key elements. Thus, after first presenting some overarching, scene-setting perspectives on participation and digital media, this presentation offers five basic parameters of participation, a conceptual framework intended to be empirically useful. The five are: trajectories, modalities, motivations, sociality and visibility. Each parameter has some further subcategories; for example, I suggest three basic trajectories: consumption, civil society and politics. These obviously are entangled with each other in the real world, yet the distinctions allow us to focus on political participation as a specific form. To what extent and how participation is realised depends on many factors. Here I highlight the notion of contingency, underscoring the point that a complex interplay of conditions and circumstances both make possible and delimit political participation. I look at three sets of contingencies: institutional features of online media (illustrated with a brief look at Google), attributes of the mainstream online environments that have a clear hegemonic character, and established social patterns of use that can also impact on this environment. For the latter, I highlight what I call the solo sphere as an emerging feature of online political participation – the tendency towards isolated, individualised communication. I then run these three types of contingencies across the five parameters to arrive at a preliminary perspective on how the online environment both facilitates and deflects political participation of the non-mainstream kind. Competing by participation – A winning marketing tool Nóra Nyirő, Tamás Csordás and Dóra Horváth Summary: In the new media and communications context audiences are more empowered than ever to make their voices heard. Audiences, consumers are actively influencing the marketing activities of firms and brands. In the new dominant logic of marketing, firms are constrained to engage in complex processes of exchange with their consumers. To be able to keep up with the competition and media noise, it is crucial for companies to involve their audiences, potential consumers. Consumer participation in this contex...

Summary: One of the cultural and media areas in which the issue of participa- tion – with all its ambiguity – has recently emerged to full significance is the area of literature and publishing. Following the music, film and television industries, the pub- lishing industry is in fact facing a vast renewal due to digitalization processes (assuming digitalization as a complex negotiation between social and technological forces). New textual formats and devices (such as e-books), new forms of distribution (e.g. online retailing), new marketing strategies (e.g. in the social media), new models of business (e.g. the print on demand) are becoming increasingly popular. At the same time digi- talization has enabled the creation of a whole new participatory, grassroots publishing market, while grassroots storytelling and social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook), used as a collaborative writing environment, bring out participatory forms of online writing that continue the tradition started almost fifteen years ago by the so-called “hypertextual fiction” and the avant-gardes before that. In this context, by addressing the theoretical debate and recent social discourses on the e-book, this article suggests a recognition of the diversity of the forms of participation that are ascribed to the new publishing scenario. Secondly – moving from the Foucauldian notion of author-function – the article solic- its the relationship between author and reader in the contemporary digital publishing scenario and addresses the question whether and under what conditions the supposed participatory turn in writing and publishing we are facing promotes the construction of a polyphonic, co-authored, recognizable, collaborative dialogue, or rather points to a cultural landscape where “all discourses [...] would develop in the anonymity of a murmur” (Foucault, 1969).

Communication, Culture & Critique, 2017

This article examines public discourse that visitors produce as part of their visit to a heritage museum. With the turn to the “new museum” of the 21st century, with its extensive reliance on new media, mediation, and an interactive-participatory agenda, museums are community generators that invite and display public participation. The article inquires ethnographically into the settings offered by a new and large Jewish heritage museum in Philadelphia, for the pursuit of “ordinary” people’s participatory discursive practices. The article then asks how visitors actually pursue their participation discursively, in the form of texts written on notes in response to the museum’s questions. Finally, visitors’ inscriptional activities are theorized in terms of current views of participation and the public sphere.

Feministisches Geo - RundMail: Informationen rund um feministische Geographie, 2017

For a very long time, migration was often represented in museums by displaying suitcases and this can be considered as a romantic representation of migrants: “They pack their little lives” in a suitcase and leave for a foreign country. In many museum displays, suitcases stand for the good old days, but also for poverty and for the hope for a better life. Furthermore, instead of presenting migrant societies by a variety of themes, museums preferred to link migration to the national history, emphasizing the concept of multiculturalism. By this, a picture of different people living together happily was drawn.

Mirroring digital culture developments in society at large, museums are increasingly incorporating social media platforms and formats into their communication practices. More than merely providing additional channels of communication, this development is invested with an understanding of social media as integral to the ongoing democratisation of the museum. The confluences of new media affordances with New Museology objectives along with the underpinnings of the aforementioned understanding is discussed in this article. The article will argue that development in this area is not only driven by solid results and public demand but also by collective assumptions and associations as well as by a political need for institutions to justify their relevance in society. In conclusion, the article suggests that, while the integration of social media communication may serve to market the museum as inclusive, it may also simply pay lip service to genuine civic engagement and democratic exchanges with the public.