Reflections on joining a community

I’m in the lobby of a hotel in Portland, Oregon, as delegates for Museums and the Web 2013 start arriving. It’s two years since I first attended this conference; the first conference I had ever been to in my life and a major career catalyst for me. Sitting here, I naturally find myself reflecting on the changes that have happened in my life since I first came into this community. I’ve often described the sensation as “finding my tribe” but, to be honest, at that point the museum tech community wasn’t my tribe. I didn’t share the language or get the jokes. I hadn’t met anyone in the sector, so I stood on the edges of a community and looked in.

That this situation has changed so significantly in such a short period of time often leaves me wondering what it was that allowed me – an outsider – to find myself and a place within this sector. What is it that makes a community and gives it meaning? And how do newcomers find their way into a community? In 1986, David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis George proposed a definition of community that included the following characteristics:

The first element is membership. Membership is the feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness. The second element is influence, a sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members. The third element is reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs. This is the feeling that members’ needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group. The last element is shared emotional connection, the commitment and belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences.

This seems like a pretty usable definition, except that I didn’t have any of these characteristics when I first came along. I didn’t feel like I had membership in the group, although I quickly became interested in becoming a member. Nor did I have influence or shared emotional connections. What I did have, however, was the good fortune of meeting people who both implicitly and explicitly invited me to become part of their discussions.

The implicit invitations could be as simple as allowing me to sit at a table with people whom I hadn’t met although they had long-standing and existing relationships; the openness of people to have a conversation and share something of themselves and their thoughts with me. The explicit invitations came from people like Koven Smith, who invited me to be part of his panel on the point of museum websites at MCN2011. I became a member of the group because I was invited by existing members to join their conversations, and given the opportunity to learn and contribute. In so doing, I started to have an understanding of the shared language and became to have an emotional connection that started to tie strongly to the community.

But inviting one person to be part of a conversation or a community isn’t particularly hard. The community borders can stretch and morph as small groups enter and exit whilst still maintaining their stability; the shared conventions and language. But is it possible to invite a significant number of new people to join an existing community and still keep a sense of internal congruity? Or, in other words, is it possible to grow a community at scale or even to have community at scale? I’m not sure that it is, but I think it’s an interesting problem for museums to be thinking about. Are museums naturally limited in the size and scope of their communities – those who have an intimate relationship with the institution and the people who are associated with it?

I’d love to know your thoughts. When have you joined a community, and what made that possible? And do you think it’s possible for large numbers of people to join a community in a short period of time, or does that threaten the self-defining nature of the community itself?

Process stories

In politics, the idea of a process story – the inside story about how policy is made – doesn’t always sit well. It’s “too inside baseball.” The focus on what is happening behind the scenes, on the machinations that impact policy outcomes is often perceived to be a distraction from the political outcomes themselves. But I’m a sucker for stories that unpack how something happens rather than simply focussing on the end result or product. I like knowing why particular choices were made and by whom; it helps me understand the flows of power and influence that shape the world.

This emphasis on process instead of only the final product is an idea that I can see in a few different places in our sector too, and I’m really excited by it. Dan Spock recently Tweeted a link to imPERFECT CITY – a fascinating sounding project from Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA), which is “a conversation-based exhibition that evolves from an open call for proposals to conceptualize a utopian city within the DCCA’s gallery spaces.” Although the project has many layers and phases, what I am most interested in is the open processes the project purports to follow, which treats the creation of the exhibition as the exhibition. As the proposal by Maiza Hixson describes, “The exhibition “opens” during the planning phase to allow citizens to interface with DCCA curatorial staff who are present to answer questions visitors may have about curatorial process.” In other words, the exhibition is the process of the exhibition; it is not just the end result. imPERFECT CITY takes its form as a living process story. In addition, the whole project makes use of documentation (blogging, videos) as a means for exploring the issues raised by the exhibition, and creating parallel digital and in-gallery experiences.

I love this. There is something really compelling about the humanness of process that is visible in this kind of approach. The edges of the exhibition become permeable and uncertain; it is impossible to know exactly when it starts or ends. How reminiscent is this of so many digital interactions, which are themselves endless and linked to so many other things? The Internet is perpetually unfinished. It is about process because it is itself a process rather than a product; a constantly-shifting performative environment which demands that those who want use it must interact with it in order to experience it. Unlike most museum exhibits, which have a definite and pre-determined start and end date and typically exist within strictly defined borders, the Internet does not privilege time and space in quite the same way. This gives us a lot of space for publicly exploring and explaining how we do what we do.

Social media and digital publishing platforms open up a lot of potential for institutions that want to create compelling content and stories about their exhibitions that aren’t so strictly bounded by the dates and spaces of the gallery. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia has made inroads in this area with their recent ePublication for Anish Kapoor, which was treated as a “living catalogue” and evolved over the course of the exhibition to include a Preview Edition, an Installation Edition, and a Reflection Edition. Rather than creating interpretive content prior to opening and never revisiting it, this catalogue continues to grow during and after the exhibition. The Installation Edition includes information about how one of the sculptures was installed in the space, opening up the mystery of the institution to the public and adding depth to the discussion about the exhibition.

The Dallas Museum of Art’s recently-announced plans for a conservation studio also offer an interesting take upon the emphasis of process in the physical space of the museum, since the studio will effectively turn conservation into an ongoing living exhibition. As Jerome Weeks describes:

[Director Max Anderson is] going to turn conservation into a public exhibit. Other museums hold the occasional tour through their work rooms. But this is different. Consistent with Anderson’s other efforts in making the DMA more accessible online, he will be, more or less, turning this internal museum function inside-out and putting a spotlight on it. Imagine a hedge fund putting the accountants on display.

Wild, right? There is a certain voyeuristic fascination we have with getting behind-the-scenes in someone’s life, in learning what goes on behind the closed doors. Opening up of parts of the institution to public view plays right into these feelings, and develops a very human understanding of what the institution does.

But this approach also shifts the focus away from the objects and exhibitions onto the human forces that impact them. Could this prove to be a distraction? This is how Australia political strategist Mark Textor describes the political process story:

One of the consequences of an increasingly expansive financial and political media field is the need for content to fill it. Some content is important. Most is borderline trivial, certainly irrelevant. But that has never discouraged the commentators. This search for content to feed the hungry commentariat has led to the rise and rise of the ”process story”. The ”process story” is about campaign mechanics, whether it be a political campaign or a big market offer, not about the issues of the campaign.

Could openly documenting the process of creating an exhibition or of an acquisition take the focus away from the exhibition itself? And is a focus on process worth the effort, or does it just promise to add to workloads whilst providing only trivial or irrelevant content? Would museum audiences be interested in gaining insight into what we do and why, or is this just be extra effort for little reward?

What do you think? Do process stories interest you? Could you see this kind of approach working in your institution?

Social obligation, crowdsourcing, and an experimental lecture

When I was asked to give a lecture on professional arts practice and technology at short notice a couple of weeks ago, I decided to use the opportunity to get a little experimental in my approach. This occurred in two ways. The first was that I reached out to my networks on Twitter, asked for your help here on the blog, and contacted a few specific individuals in the Australian arts community with whom I had a relationship, in order to seek ideas and content that I might not think of. The second was by playing with the lecture format itself in order to move out of transmission mode and take a more discursive approach.

So what worked and what didn’t? The crowdsourcing process was interesting. It yielded many useful responses and results which broadened my perspectives and highlighted issues relevant to the students that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise thought of, like Kim’s comment about the cross-over between marketing and IP. I was introduced to new artists too, and received links for useful resources which I was able to pass along to the students. So that was great.

Not all responses were equal, of course. Those links and connections that came from Twitter tended to be shallower and at times less useful than those I received from other sources. The most useful were, in general, those responses that came from people whose specific contributions I sought out. This aligns with what the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England found when they conducted their own remixing/crowdsourcing projects last year. In the first project they ran, which “consisted first in creating a novel piece of content, an image, to serve as a creative seed and then ask specific people, using plain old e-mail, to turn it into something else, i.e., to remix it,” worthwhile responses came from more than half their targetted crowd. A subsequent project was executed using a mailing list and Facebook group, but failed to attract participants and good responses. In this second project, the message was not personalised, and there were many strangers in the groups. From this, the Collective proposed that the factors of success for the first project were that it utilised “pre-existing personal relationships”, had “well-crafted, personalized tasks directed at specific individuals, compared to the diffusion of responsibilities”, and that these tasks were more detailed than the messages to the broader group. I think my experience reflects something similar.

But crowdsourcing my lecture also led to something of a social dilemma. In the odd case where I received results that were not useful in the context of this particular lecture could I ignore them, or did I owe those people who had contributed the respect of using their links or ideas regardless? The act of reaching out asking for help and receiving it, both from people I knew and from strangers, left me to confront questions around social obligation and reciprocity. It became apparent to me quite quickly that asking for help was not value-free. While it might be appropriate to simply thank someone who’d replied to my Tweeted call for help and fold their response into my written document for the students, doing the same with a longer response on the blog felt insufficient to acknowledge the time and effort that had gone into helping me out. I felt particularly obliged to make good use of the contributions that art writer Sharne Wolff, MCA Curatorial Assistant Kelly McDonald, artist and technoevangelist Fee Plumley, and artist and curator Todd Fuller gave, since I had sought them out in person. These invisible social elements of participation became apparent to me through this process in ways they hadn’t previously.

The variety of responses that I received from this approach was, in part, what led to the experiment with lecture delivery. With only an hour with all the students in a single room, it feel like I had too little time to cover a topic as massive as “art, technology, and professional practice” in any real depth, so I wanted to get the students thinking and talking about the pros and cons of being online as an artist, and the impact such choices could have on their careers. I started with ten minutes or so giving a general lay of the land about some ways that artists were using the Internet in their work and what some of the issues were, and then opened up the floor to conversation, maintaining faith that I would be able to live-mix in examples from the responses I’d received from the crowdsourcing experiment.

The approach seemed to work quite well in some ways, but not others. The discussion in the room was great, with many students contributing and almost all appearing to be engaged in it. We were able to cover some interesting theoretical ground, and I did have ready resources at my fingertips for most of the ideas that came up. However, while there were definitely some bright eyes and eager students – those excited to have technology on the agenda and to share their experiences with me and the class – many others seemed to lack confidence, both in regards to individual platforms like Twitter, and about digital experimentation itself, and I don’t know that my approach would have equipped them with many practical takeaways.

So would I take these approaches to either lecture delivery or lecture sourcing again? Delivery yes, but not on every topic. The approach seemed to work well for the particular subject, especially given the time restrictions, but I don’t think it would be appropriate in every situation. By opening up to a more dialogic teaching method probably also meant that it was close to impossible to have predictable outcomes, inviting the risk that important issues could be overlooked. So although it was effective for engagement, it wasn’t necessarily effective for all types of teaching or all subjects.

What about lecture crowd-sourcing? Honestly, I probably wouldn’t do it again, or not without more forethought about how to seek involvement, what sort of involvement to seek, and how to incorporate the responses that I received. I’d want to develop better feedback mechanisms or ways to acknowledge contributors because in some ways it felt like I was taking more from contributors than I could give back. Inviting participation can be great, but should ultimately benefit both parties, and I don’t think I thought enough about how it might benefit those who gave feedback.

Both parts of this experiment helped me better understand some of the complexities around participation; about the social obligations it engenders and the importance of designing such projects well in order to benefit all participants. Now that I’m on the other side of the experiment, the takeaways seem so obvious. But I suppose that is part of learning too, that it is often from doing that we gain insight.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with these sorts of projects. Have you encountered similar issues from those I came across? How have you dealt with the invisible social elements of participation?

And, of course, thank you to all those who did participate in my crowdsourcing experiment. It was appreciated.

#drinkingaboutmuseums – Tuesday 19 March – Jurassic Lounge

It has been a while since I popped a notice up about a #drinkingaboutmuseums session. The last one was all the way back in November, although there was an impromptu event held earlier this year when Ryan Donahue and Eleanor Whitworth were both in town which I had to miss.

This means that there’s lots of catching up to be done and discussions to be had on all the summer exhibitions, the launch of the National Cultural Policy, and upcoming conferences like Museums and the Web and Museums Australia 2013 So this coming Tuesday 19 March 2013 is the date to do it. And since we are museum people, it has been decided that we shall meet… at a museum. Yep, this month #drinkingaboutmuseums is going to be at Jurassic Lounge at the Australian Museum.

If you’re a museum/GLAM professional (or student) located in or near Sydney and can get to the Australian Museum on Tuesday for Jurassic Lounge, do. Since the museum is a big place, we’ll post updates on location within the museum to Twitter using the #drinkingaboutmuseums hashtag. Or if you’re new and haven’t been to a DAM event before, get in contact with me and I’ll send you my phone number so you don’t get lost.

Where? Jurassic Lounge – Australian Museum | 6 College Street, Sydney, Australia 2000
When? 5.30pm. Tuesday 19 March 2013
Who? You! Come along.

Confession: This is my first time to get to Jurassic Lounge, and I’m looking forward to getting in amongst the dinosaurs to have a drink and a think. I’m also a little excited to notice that the theme for the event next week is Bollywood! Not only does this sound fun in itself, but it also recalls to me an amusing episode from my past, when I was a dream-sequence dancing girl in a Bollywood movie filmed in Sydney in the late 90s. Yes, it’s true. Somewhere out there exists footage of me, getting my Bollywood movie moves on whilst on the steps of the Opera House and various locations around Darling Harbour. So if you come along to #drinkingaboutmuseums on Tuesday, it might be possible to convince me to relive such ‘glory’ days, and shimmy my way around the museum. And if not, it’s just a great opportunity to connect with other museum folk.

Meanwhile, this is just to get you in the mood…

Worlds within worlds: Immersion and museums

There has been significant discussion in recent months about immersive experiences in museums. Seb Chan and Ed Rodley have both written on the subject in response to the site-specific performance Sleep No More; Elizabeth Merritt has asked what museums can learn from Derren Brown: Apocalypse, a two-part television series that immersed a single protagonist in a surreal ‘other world’; and Nina Simon wants to know “why aren’t museums great at telling… deep, intense stories? Why are exhibitions, which have huge potential as immersive, multi-platform narrative devices, so rarely used to that effect?” Clearly immersion is on our collective minds.

But what makes an experience or environment immersive? And why should museums care about using immersive techniques in their exhibitions? Perhaps the simplest explanation comes from Simon herself: immersion “takes you into another world.” It’s a concept associated with video games, virtual reality, and fiction, and is tied closely to the idea of flow; a form of completely focussed motivation. And, as Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon note, it can be related to pleasure as well, which can come from “interactive narratives that build on both agency and complex, yet familiar, narrative schemas.” Immersion, then, offers museums a tool for providing challenging yet pleasurable experiences.

According to Jamie Madigan’s 2010 post on the psychology of immersion in video games, immersion can occur in a rich ~~gaming~~ story environment that has “multiple channels of sensory information”, “completeness of sensory information”, “cognitively demanding environments”, and “a strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story.” However, per Douglas and Hargadon, the environment cannot be completely chaotic without opportunity for the individual to gain his or her bearings, nor entirely familiar, offering nothing new to surprise or challenge. Instead, the schema at work in creating the storyworld (whether fictional or otherwise) must be authentic and consistent, but also allow for wonder.

This rings true to my own most recent experience of immersion, which took place at the Australian National Maritime Museum on Sunday. It was my first visit to the museum, and I skipped straight past the galleries to the ships. It was on board the Onslow, a submarine built in 1968, that things got interesting for me…

Immediately upon entering the submarine, I started feeling light-headed. My heart rate went up, and I began having difficulty breathing. Even though I’ve never been susceptible to claustrophobia, being trapped in the narrow, tinny aisle of the submarine, unable to go backwards or control the pace at which I progressed forwards (stuck as I was between other visitors), my body reacted. Mentally, I knew I was safe. But my body was firing off entirely different signals.

Why did it react so? Why did my body believe it was in danger, when logic told me all was well? The submarine flooded my senses. It had a smell of ageing metals and dust; like an old hospital. The skinny corridors curtailed my natural movement. A soundtrack played through the speakers that – I’m fairly sure – included a siren to indicate that we were soon to dive. From the moment of entry, when I had to climb backwards down the angular metal steps into the sub, my whole body was tricked into believing that this world within my world was real – and a threat.

I was transported; caught in the universe of the submariners. It was one of the most affective experiences I’ve had in a museum context.

The immersion came from more than just engagement in their story however. When my body reacted so strongly to the submarine, it was in part because it felt transported from my usual safe (and sunlit) world into a universe of metal, war, and submersion. It was disengaged – separated – from the everyday, from the context of real life.

In November, when I wrote about Sleep No More, I observed that the audience was “funnelled down a long, dark corridor to enter the McKittrick Hotel; consistently being primed for the evening at hand, even whilst in the act of transportation from one place to the next.” I was thinking about behavioural priming; what a museum does to prepare the visitor for the museum experience. But I failed to truly note the significance of this tunnelled entryway. It was not a mere passage from place to place; it was also a device that transported me from the ‘real’ world into the richly detailed storyworld. The neutral zone of the tunnel forced a fission between my life outside Sleep No More, and the internal universe with its own rules and practices. With this distance, I could give in more fully to the possibilities and drama of the McKittrick Hotel and its occupants.

This is quite different from my average museum visit, where there is only limited demarcation between the story inside the museum and that outside; or in the spaces between exhibitions. Yet consider how a similar trope is utilised at Disneyland to set the audience up for their experience in ‘the happiest place on Earth.’ In a paper on Walt Disney’s use of ’emotional environments’, Josef Chytry writes* that Disney carefully calibrated the Disneyland storyworld to engage the guest in a total experience (emphasis mine):

For his emotional environment proper, Disney ensured that entry to the park would be substantively separated from outside reality. This passage was intended to induce in ‘guests’ the appropriate mood, so that once these ‘guests’ came into ‘Main Street, USA’ – another invention of Disney’s – they were ready for ‘happiness’.

The entire visit was choreographed to be affective; an emotional environment designed from the start to invoke a sense of wonder. (I know many museum types professionally disdain the Disneyfication of culture, but surely there are worse things.) Similarly, at Tasmania’s MONA, the visitor does not merely arrive at the museum from the street. From Ed Rodley’s description of his visit to MONA last year:

The oft-repeated marketing catchphrase is that MONA is “a subversive adult Disneyland” which like a lot of PR fluff, captures some of the emotional appeal, but not much else. MONA isn’t a theme park. It is also not a temple to secular culture the way writers like Alain de Botton have claimed museums have become. It certainly has some of those otherworldly associations; it is a destination if you approach via water ferry; the long climb up, and the descent into the hillside MONA is carved into. If MONA is any kind of temple, it’s more an oracular cave than an edifice of orthodoxy.

To which museum owner David Walsh responds:

it’s a pleasure to see your reference to an ‘oracular cave’. The effort required from a visitor by ferry, to rise and descend, was intended to make one mindful of exactly that notion. You are, apparently, the first to see what to me was a transparent gesture.

Entering another world – a storyworld – requires that we unshackle ourselves from the real world, if only for a short time. The world of MONA is severed from that of the everyday by boat, and an oracular entryway. Even more than that, it is separated from mainland Australia, necessitating a significant journey to get there for all but locals; a journey frequently undertaken for the sole purpose of visiting the museum. (Maybe it’s more like Disneyland than Rodley gives it credit for…) Immersion also requires multiple channels of sensory engagement, cognitively rich environments, and strong and interesting narratives. Is such an approach always of value for museums? I don’t know that it is. But given that immersion can lead to flow, wonder and engagement, it certainly seems like something worth examining further. I certainly won’t forget my visit to the Onslow any time soon.

What do you think?

*unfortunately behind a paywall

A trailing spouse? Has being partnered affected your museum career choices?

When I was a mere kitten of five years old, my family relocated to Papua New Guinea. My dad had received an interesting job opportunity, so he, my mum and I all moved to the tropics and spent several years negotiating life in another culture.

This was one of a few moves that we made when I was growing up; all of them for my father’s work. Although both my parents became high-achievers in their respective fields, it was my father’s opportunities that drove us around the country and overseas. His career was more established, and we followed on. It was not until my dad retired that my mother really had opportunities to pursue her own career ambitions, but once she did, her career soared.

Within the museum sector, cross-institutional (or even cross-country) relocation for work appears to be strongly tied to advancement, particularly at the upper echelons. While it might just be a skip from institution to institution (if you’re lucky enough to live in a city with multiple cultural institutions), oftentimes progress seems to require more significant jumps than just across town. Indeed, the first two commenters on a 2011 Center for the Future of Museums post about landing a job in the museum of the future both observe how important it is to be willing to move in order to find work in the sector.

Why is this? Is it just that so many employers within the sector are small museums that might have only a handful of staff positions? In my home town, I would guess that there are less than 30 full time positions within the scattering of museums, so the opportunities for growth are fairly few and far between. Moving town to find a full time position makes sense, because openings are rare and are highly fought over. I’ve often seen internal applicants for those scarce jobs passed over for those with experience at outside institutions. This is an understandable choice; external applicants will bring with them different experiences and knowledge from those already contained in-house within the institution, but one that can be challenging for people located where there are few other opportunities for growth.

If moving to find work isn’t absolutely imperative, it seems particularly common in high achievers. Victoria Turner, in a 2002 paper on The Factors Affecting Women’s Success in Museum Careers, writes that:

The career paths of high profile men and women in museums and related fields show much variety: some have worked their way through one institution; others have moved between many high profile organizations; others started in small museums and moved on to larger ones; others began their careers in different sectors (Who’s Who 2001).

But what happens when the choice to move for work isn’t yours to make alone? In the same paper, Turner explicates that (emphasis mine):

with limited jobs available, and no clear career progression, museum employees often find it necessary to move around the country in order to advance their career. This is clearly complicated where a family is involved, for employees of either sex (Carmichael 2001), but as women are still often considered as secondary earners, it will often be more difficult for them to institute a move, a major factor inhibiting women’s career progression (Kolb in Taylor 1984).

Is this one reason (amongst many) why there remains significant disparity between high female employment in the arts and comparatively low representation at the top? As an older post on psychologytoday.com indicates that (emphasis mine):

Of those people who moved for work in 1993, a scant 17 percent were women–and only 10 percent of them were married… A recent poll of unemployed executives showed that men are three times as likely to pick up and move for a new position than women.

These statistics are old, and not specific to the sector, but a clear gap still seems present between men and women on the question of moving for career advancement. We work in a sector filled with women where progression, or even getting a job to begin with, can be tied strongly to the possibility of going elsewhere, a situation that seems – on the surface at least – disadvantageous to those same women. So what’s a girl to do? Is it possible to progress, to make an impact, to grow without acquiescing to pressures to go elsewhere? Does living in a highly connected world change the playing field at all, or will cross-institutional advancement still trump? And what is our obsession with hiring those with reputations and experiences gained elsewhere? Do such practices ensure better hires, or just ones that sell better to boards and funders?

It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a women’s problem however. Even if they’re in the minority of those who initiate moves, women are not the only ones who become ‘trailing spouses’, and partner dissatisfaction on the part of either sex can have a major impact upon the success of a relocation for work. In a NYTimes article on the question of trailing spouses and dual career couples, it is noted that:

According to the 1999 Global Relocation Trends Survey conducted by Windham International GMAC and the National Foreign Trade Council, almost half of all spouses accompanying expatriates had jobs before moving abroad. Of that number, only 11 percent were employed during the assignment. The same survey lists partner dissatisfaction as the most common reason for an assignment to fail, although the exact cause of that dissatisfaction is not spelled out.

A 1999/2000 survey by the accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers of 270 European employers found that almost two thirds listed the spouse or partner’s career as a barrier to mobility. The authors of the study also noted that “factors rated least highly by companies when selecting people for assignments such as partner adaptability and dual career management are the most likely to be the cause of failed assignments.”

I’m really interested in how this attachment to movement impacts our sector, and those who work within it. What have your experiences been?

Have you moved for work, or conversely, been prevented from progression (directly or indirectly) because you haven’t done so? What impact has your choice made upon your career, or your family? Why did you make that choice? And if you haven’t been able to move, have you found other tactics to enable career progression?

When seeing becomes social: How the network is changing the way I look at the world.

In response to the 2010 Edge Annual Question How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think? classicist James O’Donnell proposed that his fingers have become part of his brain. That “the sign of thinking is that I reach for the mouse and start “shaking it loose”… My eyes and hands have already learned to work together in new ways with my brain in a process of clicking, typing a couple of words, clicking, scanning, clicking again that really is a new way of thinking for me.

That finger work is unconscious. It just starts to happen. But it’s the way I can now tell thinking has begun as I begin working my way through an information world more tactile than ever before.”

I, too, often kind of “type” my thoughts into mid-air; a kinetic response to thinking. Is this just a direct response to the time I spend in front of a computer, thinking, and to the devices I use? Possibly. But it isn’t the only response to what O’Donnell terms “the living presence of networked information.” My greater response is far more encompassing than that. Because of my direct connection to my networks – to you – to people with shared interests and frames of reference with whom my buy-in to conversation is the input of interesting content or comment, the way I actually look at the world, the way I listen, and the attention I pay, is shifting. It is as though the network itself is a giant amorphous creature, and I am merely one eye that can see for it; a scout whose role is to look at the world for the information that will benefit the network itself, and bring it back.

When I last visited a museum, you were there with me. I carried you, reader, in my thoughts; in my pocket; in my devices. Though you had no eyes of your own, you stood behind my eyes when I looked at the objects; when I observed the space. Your presence changed my looking. How could I translate what was in front of my eyes and make it meaningful for you? My looking was looking on your behalf as much as my own. Simultaneously, I took note of what interested me and what might interest you. I tried to pay attention to the sorts of things you might want to know, so that if you asked questions, I’d have answers. I did so to have content for this blog; to have reasons for connection. I did so to ensure that I’d have something to contribute to our conversations; something to talk about.

My network, of which you are part, is shifting the way I understand the world. In one way, this is because much of the information that I encounter comes through you. You link to articles, you share news, you provide new perspectives in comments and discussion. You filter forward those things that you think are worth paying attention to, and in so doing shape the way I, as part of your network, understand the world.

But this is not the only way your presence is reshaping how I negotiate or interact with the world. It is actually changing the way I see, and hear. The sorts of ~~Tweetable phrases~~ stories I now listen for, the photographs I take, the anecdotes I file away that might be of use or interest for this blog, they all shape the kind of attention I pay to the world. When I attend a conference without Twitter, I hear entirely different nuance in the presentations from what I hear when I am seeking to translate and Tweet the ideas. The looking that I do; the listening. It is all changed as a result of my interactions with the network; with you.

The perceptions that we have of the world shape the way we understand it, and new technologies lead to new perceptions. Perhaps my greatest shift in this direction came once I had an iPhone; once I began to carry in my pocket a device that would allow me to capture and share what I was seeing or hearing instantly via tools like Twitter – tools that were simultaneously personal and not directed at any single other person. This device, these capabilities altered the way I experienced the physical world. I no longer had to be stuck behind my desk to share content, to make connections; I could do so from the wild. This started changing what I saw by changing what I looked for.

I now see socially. I listen, not just for myself, but for what I can translate and share to my networks. I pay attention to the ideas that you, my network, is interested in, and in so doing, I encounter the world through that lens. The things I notice are not of interest to me alone. I notice those things that I think you would be interested in too, and I think of you when I am noticing them.

When I am in situ in the museum, I encounter the space through the framework of shared assumptions that my digital networks use. My network, who I am connected to, what their interests are, changes how I see and understand the museum and the world. It changes the way I encounter and read objects. It even changes where I go, because I attend events that will be of interest and relevant to the people in my network.

What are the implications of this? We know that the museum visitor does not encounter the object as a tabula rasa, a blank slate. He or she constructs meaning based on existing knowledge and past experiences. But if I’m right about this change in looking, if looking is now taking place socially, then there are new elements and influences at play as well.

What do you think? Are you aware of changes that connection to the network has made to how you look at and interpret the world? Is this any different from the way you encountered spaces or events prior to carrying a networked device on your person?

When failing isn’t awesome (or, notes on pain)

A couple of years ago, in the pre-PhD days, I was learning to mountain bike. This sport was not a natural fit for me. I have an easy propensity towards adrenalin, and rocketing down a hill at pace with trees lunging at me and lumps in the ground rearing up to try to catch my wheels was not ideal. But I dig nature, I enjoy cycling, and I wanted to give it a go.

One day, I was trying to master a particularly challenging creek crossing when my wheel landed in a hole and threw me over. Unfortunately I continued to hold onto the handlebars as I sailed over them, which meant that my landing on rocks was borne almost entirely by my chest, and I fractured my sternum. This was ok. I have worn injuries before (and no doubt will again). The pain wasn’t that bad, and it healed within a few weeks or months. But it did hurt. And it became one major bump on a journey which led to me hanging up the mountain bike and returning almost exclusively to road cycling.

I failed a lot during my tenure as a mountain bike rider. Some of those failures led to growth. I would try going over a particular obstacle or part of the trail over and again until I got it right. But oftentimes when I did so, my body would come away battered and bruised. Continued falls left my confidence shaken. My body would tense up in anticipation of the pain, leading to further distress and ensuring that I actually failed more often. Almost daily I would push my limits, come up wanting, and have to live with the scars and pain of that experience. Some of them linger still, years on. And eventually I gave the sport away.

Failing has become something of a fetish of late. It feels that I cannot turn anywhere without someone extolling the virtues of having permission to fail. And you know what, I get it. But unless your experiences of failure are radically different to my own, it’s not something I can really imagine lining up for time and time again, permission or no. Because failure hurts.

The pain can be physical, as it so often was for me when mountain biking. It can be emotional, too. It can lodge itself at the base of your stomach and grip your intestines in a vice. Following my most significant personal failures, I have wanted to disappear; to delete myself from the pages of people’s memories and reemerge an anonymous tabula rasa. As Margery Eldredge Howell put it, “There’s dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again.”

Institutional failure also brings pain. The costs of choosing to invest in the wrong thing or of making a public misstep can be significant. Mike Edson published an interesting discussion about skunkworks and scale recently. Among the many useful observations is this one:

How we do work inside organizations, the choices we make about how to invest and cultivate the talents and energy of our colleagues and community, has a huge and direct impact on people’s lives and careers. Project failures can be instructive, sometimes, but I’ve seen people fired, disgraced, and passed over for promotion when initiatives fail. I’ve seen talented employees leave the museum industry in frustration, and I’ve seen the public good diminished when organizations squander resources and produce something small and OK when they could have delivered something solid, huge, and great.

Although we might wish that there was no sting in failure, it does have consequences. They might just be ego repercussions when, humiliated and vulnerable, you have to face colleagues or loved ones after you’ve screwed up. Or they might be bigger than that. But if what you’re trying to achieve means something, then the failure will mean something too.

In her great piece on the downside of the startup failure craze, Lydia DePillis proposes that de-stigmatising the practice of failure is “a pre-emptive psychological defense mechanism” against a startup failure boom. As we see museum culture being infused by tech culture, it is little surprise to discover a similar attitude in museums, and in many ways it is positive. Innovation does indeed require risk, and risk carries with it an almost inherent possibility of failure. Woe betide the institution that fears failure so much as to fall into a state of permanent inertia. But museums are institutions that have, always, an eye to longevity and the future, and failure is rarely consequence-free.

I think that when people seek institutions that embrace failure, they are looking to reduce the sting, that personal pain of getting things wrong. Yet I’ve never known that pain to go away in situations that matter.

I have learned in my life to come back from my failures. I will never forget my first big fail, nor many of the subsequent missteps. Each has taught me something. But they have also hurt. Though the pain has dulled with time, I still carry it. And it is hard to face into the wind and open yourself up to criticism, to failure, to pain. It is even harder to do it when you’re already bruised and tired; when your confidence has been shaken. Or at least, it is for me.

I’d love to know about your experiences with failure, professional or otherwise. Do you agree that failure hurts? Have you had to pick yourself up again after a serious failure, and start again? How did you deal with the fallout?

In algorithms we trust.

And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years… They’re using Pragmatic Chaos now. Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing. It’s trying to get a grasp on you, on the firmware inside the human skull, so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next — which is a very, very difficult problem. But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don’t really quite have it down, it doesn’t take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has. Pragmatic Chaos, like all Netflix algorithms, determines, in the end, 60 percent of what movies end up being rented. So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies.

But what if you could rate those movies before they get made? Wouldn’t that be handy? Well, a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood, and they have “story algorithms” — a company called Epagogix. And you can run your script through there, and they can tell you, quantifiably, that that’s a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie. And the thing is, is that this isn’t Google. This isn’t information. These aren’t financial stats; this is culture. And what you see here, or what you don’t really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know? What would it look like?

[Transcript of How algorithms shape our worldI]

When Pythagoras discovered that “things are numbers and numbers are things,” he forged a connection between the material world and mathematics. His insight “that there is something about the real world that is intelligible in mathematical terms, and perhaps only in mathematical terms,” was, according to Charles Van Doren, “one of the great advances in the history of human thought.” (p35) Are we at a similar precipice with culture and information, when algorithms shape our world and culture? When non-human actors can significantly impact upon the information we receive, and the choices we make? And if so, what does that mean for museums, for culture, for the way we understand our world?

This is a question I sometimes find myself grappling with, although I’m not sure I have any answers. The more I learn, the less it seems I know. But I’d like to take a couple of minutes to consider one aspect of the relationship between the algorithm and the museum, being the question of authority.

In 2009, Clay Shirky wrote a speculative post on the idea of algorithmic authority, in which he proposed that algorithms are increasingly treated as authoritative and, indeed, that the nature of authority itself is up for grabs. He writes:

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

These characteristics are, firstly, that algorithmic authority “takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published”; that the algorithm “produces good results” which people consequently come to trust; and that, following these two processes, people learn that not only does the algorithm produce good results, the results are also trusted by others in their group. At that point, Shirky argues, the algorithm has transitioned to being authoritative.

Although I’ve previously touched on the idea of algorithmic curating, I’d never explicitly considered its relationship to authority and trust, so I decided to look a little deeper into these issues. Were there any commonalities between the type of authority and trust held by and in museums, and that held in algorithms?

Philosopher Judith Simon refers to Shirky’s post in an article considering trust and knowledge on the Web in relation to Wikipedia. She argues that people trust in Wikipedia’s openness and transparency, rather than in the individual authors. She writes “that the reason why people trust the content of Wikipedia is that they trust the processes of Wikipedia. It is a form of procedural trust, not a trust in persons.”

I think this procedural trust is also what we put in the algorithm. Blogger Adrian Chan puts it this way:

The algorithm generally may invoke the authority of data, information sourcing, math, and scientific technique. Those are claims on authority based in the faith we put in science (actually, math, and specifically, probabilities). That’s the authority of the algorithm — not of any one algorithmic suggestion in particular, but of the algorithmic operation in general.

We do not necessarily trust in the particularities; we trust the processes. Is the trust that people have in museums similarly procedural? Do we trust in the process of museum work, rather than in the individual results or in the people who work in museums?

There are a myriad of assumptions that we make about people working in museums; that they are well trained and professional; that they are experts in their particular domain. We implicitly trust the people, then, and the work that they do. However, in many cases, such as when we visit an exhibit, we don’t know who the specific people are who worked on the exhibition. We don’t necessarily know who the curator was, or who wrote the exhibition text. The lack of visibility inherent in many current museum processes obscures the individual and their work. The museum qua museum, therefore, acts as a mechanism for credibility because it purports to bring the best people together; because the people who work within are known to be trained professionals who use scientific methods, regardless of whether we know specifically who they are or what their particular training is. Ergo, the trust we have in the museum must also be a form of procedural trust. (Amy Whitaker concurs, “Institutional trust is founded on process, on the belief that there are proper channels and decision-making mechanisms and an absence of conflict of interest.” p32)

Shirky also speaks to the social element involved in authority. He explains:

Authority… performs a dual function; looking to authorities is a way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the penalty for being wrong. An authoritative source isn’t just a source you trust; it’s a source you and other members of your reference group trust together. This is the non-lawyer’s version of “due diligence”; it’s impossible to be right all the time, but it’s much better to be wrong on good authority than otherwise, because if you’re wrong on good authority, it’s not your fault.

Authority isn’t just derived from whether we can trust a source of information, but additionally whether we can be confident in passing that information along and putting our name to the fact that we made a judgement on its trustworthiness. We shortcut the process of personal judgement using known systems that are likely to give us accurate and trustworthy results; results we can share in good faith. We trust museums because museums are perceived to be trustworthy.

Do the film companies that run their scripts through Epagogix’s algorithms do so because it helps them shortcut the process of personal judgement too? Can algorithms provide better insight, or just safer insight? Eli Pariser says this of Netflix’s algorithms:

The problem with [the algorithm] is that while it’s very good at predicting what movies you’ll like — generally it’s under one star off — it’s conservative. It would rather be right and show you a movie that you’ll rate a four, than show you a movie that has a 50% chance of being a five and a 50% chance of being a one. Human curators are often more likely to take these kinds of risks.

Right now, museums that do not embrace technology and technologically-driven solutions are often perceived to be risk averse, because doing so challenges existing practice. I wonder whether, with time, it will be those institutions that choose not to make choices driven by data that will become perceived as the risk-takers? This is a profession that is tied so strongly to notions of connoisseurship; what relationship will the museum have with the algorithm (internally, or external algorithms like those that drive Google and other sites)? I don’t have any answers yet, but I think it’s worth considering that museums no longer just share authority with the user-generated world; authority is also being shared with an algorithmically-shaped one.

What do you think?