Virtual audience

This morning I was part of the virtual audience as the JHU Museum Studies seminar participants toured the Newseum and relayed information about the exhibitions they saw and the idea of the free press.

It took me a few tries to write that sentence, because I'm not sure I ever completely grasped what was going on. This isn't the fault of the students that organized this morning's event, and I hesitate to use the word "fault" at all, because (again, if I'm understanding correctly) I think part of the point of this project was to explore the weaknesses as well as the benefits of this type of virtual audience participation. Just as challenging as understanding the project was fumbling around with Twitter, which I rarely use and am not really a fan of. For the sake of helping out my former classmates and maybe getting more comfortable with the service, I gave the tweet-up a try, but in "real life" this is not the medium I'd use to try to interact with a museum, and an event like this would likely not attract my interest.

Another challenge was understanding what my role as an audience member was supposed to be. Before the event, we were told to imagine we lived in a country that did not have a free press or a free society, and to think of questions we would ask of people who do have these freedoms. Good scenario, but when the event started, I was uncertain of when I should be asking my questions. As the seminar group moved through the museum, tweeting what they saw as they went, I felt like I would be interrupting if I posed any of my role-playing questions. Later, when the group was in an exhibition related to protest, it seemed like a good time for the role-playing scenario and a few brief conversations took place. But then when they moved on to the 9/11 exhibition, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to respond to questions like "What versions of media do you remember encountering on 9/11?" as myself or as my imagined persona. (I decided the latter didn't make much sense, so I responded from my own perspective.)

I think the most critical issue is that the questions I wanted to ask, and the answers I wanted to hear, just don't reasonably fit into Twitter's format. It was a challenge to think of things to ask that were worthwhile, would generate a meaningful answer, fit in less than 140 characters (including the essential #jhudc hashtag) and be answerable by someone in the middle of a Q&A session layered on top of a fast-paced museum visit. Again, maybe it's more that I don't feel comfortable using Twitter, but I didn't get the sense of having participated either in a conversation or or in a museum experience. Although I am an enthusiastic supporter of museums exploring digital technology as a way to engage audiences and create experiences that extend beyond their physical walls, I personally need something a lot more "real" than tweets to feel like that goal is being met.