Expertise vs. control

Nina Simon in the Museum 2.0 blog has a great think-piece on the tensions of social networking and established cultural organizations (in her case, museums). As user-generated content and other participatory practices evolve on the web, many traditional cultural centers are getting increasingly woozy about eroding standards, populism over excellence, and loss of the ”pure” experience. Simon suggests that these folks are conflating ”authority,” ”expertise,” and ”control,” in a way that’s unhealthy for their future, and even inconsistent with their mission. Says she (with added emphasis from me):

Museums should feel protective of the expertise reflected in their
staff, exhibits, programs, and collections. In most museums, the
professional experience of the staff — to preserve objects, to design
exhibits, to deliver programs — is not based on content control. It’s
based on creation and delivery of experiences. And in a world where
visitors want to create, remix, and interpret content messages on their
own, museums can assume a new role of authority as “platforms” for
those creations and recombinations.

That new form of authority — museum as platform provider rather than content provider — comes with four basic levers that Simon spins out in detail:

1. the power to set the rules of behavior
2. the power to preserve and exploit user-generated content
3. the power to promote and feature preferred content
4. the power to define the types of interaction available to users

It’s increasingly clear that our standard conception of cultural authority — conveyed through the curatorial function and public face of centralized institutions in the arts — was useful and even strategic for much of the evolution of our field. That standard is becoming decreasingly relevant, however, and increasingly disconnected from the way our audiences think and live.

It is certainly scary to change, especially core values and longtime practices. But it’s not like we have a choice.

[ Thanks Marian, for the link. Thanks Nina, for the thoughts. ]