MacGuffins

Museums have been around in the real world for a while and a rich set of understandings and expectations have grown up around them. But the web is still something like a western boom town. We’ve tossed up some buildings overnight but we have yet to live in them for very long. Some are just facades.

So far museums have done a better job of putting their content online than they have of reproducing the social architecture and topology of "the old country." With only a few notable exceptions, most museums web sites are not "places" in a way that even remotely compares to their brick and mortar counterparts.

My sense is that most museum web sites do a pretty good job on the content side compared to how well they do on the social side. Museums don't necessarily understand the social function of objects and spaces in their own museums and thus aren't able to reproduce those functions online.

What is the role of this painting (Picasso's Artist and his Model) and this museum (Pinakothek der Moderne) in these young people's lives? I couldn’t even find this painting on the Pinakothek website, but supposing I could: do you suppose they would provide anything remotely resembling the same "value proposition" to website visitors the the physical museum is providing here? Has anyone gotten married to somebody they met at your museum website?

Museums are places to make passes at people who wear glasses. They are places to show off your new wardrobe, practice your French pronunciation, people-watch, eavesdrop, and show off the fun facts you learned about Matisse or the boiling point of helium, or just stroll with a friend...

Its hard to do any of those things at most museum websites, though if you think about it, you can do some of them on Flickr. Flickr has done a pretty good job at turning digital images into social objects.

Sociologists speak of boundary objects serving as interfaces between different communities of practice. There is a sense in which all museum objects serve as boundary objects. But the interactions occasioned by those objects are phatic as well as interpretive. Objects serve as pretexts for both small and big talk. They are the MacGuffins of our personal and public dramas; they create social possibilities that would not exist otherwise.

In object-centered social interactions, objects play the role of the ball in soccer, the cards in whist, the book of "Launcelot" in the story of Paolo and Francesca.

Obviously, people won’t do exactly the same things in online museums that they do in real museums. But they will certainly want an equally rich experience. And for that experience to have anything to do with a museum’s mission, it is going to have to include social objects. Otherwise we might as well go to bar or chat with our friends on Facebook.

Objects are props. They share a social space with humans. The social space they share is the museum.

This article was originally published as a guest post on New Curator.