Reasonably Suspect, but Please Don’t Lose Your Sympathy

My classmate, Sherry Wang (@wxr0992) recently mentioned one of the hottest news in China in her blog, about a sick-girl’s father seeking for the public financial help from the social media. It was a huge success at the very first beginning, by addressing that his daughter would get 1 Chinese Yuan (equals to 0.15 dollar) donation from a public account called “小铜人(@xtr188)” by every single “article sharing,” this article shown up on almost every of my Chinese friend’s Wechat Moment and eventually gained this father more than 2 millions Yuan (equals $ 291.4K ) over 48 hours.

Then the story started to reverse. People began to doubt the truth of the whole thing from all different kinds of aspects:

Some doubted this little girl wasn’t that sick, and the treatment won’t cost that much money;

Some accused this father had been making money from his own daughter’s tragedy;

Some revealed the truth that this family owns three estates and got the governmental medical support so they were able to afford the treatment fee by themselves;

Some doubted if this Wechat public account “@xtr188” was legit to do the fundraising since it is a commercial account who’s selling their products at the same time.

People got angry, by feeling been fooled and used, and this father and this public account’s roles rapidly changed from a “hopeless-but-deep-in-love-with-his-daughter’s father” and a “kind and helpful public program” into a “selfish-money-supremacist” and a “profit-oriented company,” who also could be simply called as “liars”.

I always believe in the merits of humanity. I hope this story is true, then no one had been lied and people would still trust our society, and especially our online community on social media. However, at the same time, I was kinda hoping it’s a fraud and there’s no little girl dying. I spent days to find more information but I got much and much more confused. There were so many reports and articles and I did not know which I should believe.

This is not a single case. Nowadays when more and more people rely on social media to get all the information, “fake news” issue becomes much more serious. In a recent blog, Sam Mallikarjunan (@Mallikarjunan) talked about how the Facebook fake news influenced public judgement and how people lost their trust of social media during this Election. But unfortunately, there’s no way to totally avoid the fake news for now. But, like Zackerberg stated, hard efforts should be made to fight with them.

And I think there’s more we can do. Expect of expecting the algorithm, we should work together to build a more legit and ethic online social environment. It took generations to create the current legal system to navigate our society, and the same effort should be made to meliorate the online world. It would be hard, but I believe we’ll see the result we want someday. So before that day, I wish we could still keep our sympathy, with holding the belief of our online society and human-being.

Post Thanksgiving Sharing

It was great to spend my second Thanksgiving holiday here in America. I had a full-day off, joined in two “Friendsgiving,” and ate tons of turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, and cranberry source. I would say that I’ve deeply fallen in love with this holiday just because it kept my belly full all the time.

Then I saw this painting – 

The First Thanksgiving, 1621, J. L. G. Ferris., Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Just like the one printed in my history book when we were in middle school.

We’ve been told that the First Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims when they got their first harvest in the “New World” in October 1621, and Native Americans were depicted as nameless generic “Indians” who’d been welcomed and treated by those Pilgrims.

Similar depictions appeared on a lot of paintings made by European artists by that time. The European were always as the decent leader, who brought the Native American modern life and civilization. However, the view from the Native American was different. Like this painting –

Chief Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses (Tasunka Kokipapi/Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses),1870-1880, Oglala Lakota (Oglala Sioux), the National Museum of the American Indian.

Honestly I didn’t realize this until I started my study here, especially after took classes like “Museum and Community” and “the Early American Paintings,” and visited the exhibition “Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations” at the National Museum of American Indian, which I highly recommended you guys to go there and have a look. My understanding of the Native American and this “mostly-distorted-history-before” had been corrected and deepened by these classes and exhibitions, and I think that’s why I was kinda feeling weird when I saw this “the First Thanksgiving” Painting – I knew there was something wrong with this painting.

So I googled “the Native American and Thanksgiving” and find this amazing article provided by the National Museum of American Indian – “American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving“. Generally, it told me the “true story” about Thanksgiving and discovered the hidden history for me. I would not want to destroy your reading experience so I’ll stop here. But just like the exhibition, I also highly recommend you to read this article, just in case your (future) kids asking and I hope you have the right answer.

At last, happy Thanksgiving and happy holiday!!!

Social Media is NOT FREE

Since we have to make a plan for better working on our program’s social media, I spent some time to look through them and also some other more “successful” ones, and not surprisedly, I think the big issue is actually really simple – we don’t have enough people to work on these social media platforms.

Don’t take me wrong, when I say “not enough people,” I’m not indicating we should have a 10-people team working full-time, which could be true for those big museums, like the Met, MOMA, or the  Smithsonian (I believe they do have a big team for social media work and I think they’re doing great jobs!). But the truth is, we really have NO ONE working on our social media specifically right now.

If you’ve ever read my blogs (love you if you did!), you know I love to use numbers to support my ideas. So here’re the numbers:

• We  (Museum Studies Program at the George Washington University) currently have 2 public official social media platforms, the @GWMuseumStudies page on Facebook, and @GWMuseumStudies on Twitter, and only 1 being active – the Facebook page.
• The Facebook page was launch in May 15, 2010, and gained 1,090 likes for the past 6 years.
• The Facebook page posted averagely only 1.3 times per month.
• The Twitter account started in 2011, and it has 452 tweets, 586 followers, and 21 likes.
• The Twitter account is not currently active, and the latest tweet was posted on July 26, 2016.

Looks fine? Okay, let’s see some other numbers:

• Also launched in 2011, the Museum Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins (@JHMuseumStudies) has 6,484 tweets, 3,508 followers, and nearly 1k likes.
• The Museum Studies Program at the University of Delaware posts on Facebook almost every single week-day; and its Twitter (@UDMusuemStudies) has 5,763 tweets and 3,248 followers.
• The Corcoran School of GW‘s Twitter (@CorcoranGW) has 6,050 tweets and 9,482 followers since 2011.

Not to mention the variety of their posts’ content, the high-quality photos they were using, and the great communications they were holding online all the time, let’s just focus on the number of their posts – it’s a huge difference between 3 digits and 4! However, we really can not blame on my program since, like I said before, there’s no one really working on the social media thing right now.

So let’s go back to my topic today – social media is not free. People always say “hey let’s set up a twitter account to help with my business! It’s free!” It’s true when only considering “having an account,” because “maintaining an account” costs a lot.

At first, it costs time.

One of the most important things I learnt from this “Museums and Social Media” class this semester is doing social media as a work is definitely different with doing for pleasure. It costs tons of time to find an attractive and appropriate topic which is also on trend, write it down, and then squeeze it into 140 characters if you’re doing Twitter, and take an interesting photo, try at least 10 filters, and #hashtag #hashtag #hashtag. You will never feel it but 2 hours past already.

If you want to keep a good relationship with your audiences, you should keep an eye on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever you have, to appreciate the good comments, and probably “manage” the bad ones.

Second, it costs labor.

No one would want to work 24/7 for free! If you only have one or two accounts and only using them for updating information, you could ask one of your employee to take care of them just for some additional work. However, if you really want to maintain an active online profile and maybe using these social media to outreach more audiences (costumes), a professional social media manager would be worth to hire. My program’s issue is just like this, we don’t have anyone working on social media anymore. I believe there’re some department officers taking care of the Facebook page occasionally, but the posts’ quantity and quality tell us this is not working well.

Third, it costs money.

Yes, believe me, it does. I volunteered for helping organizing an International Event before and the manager asked me to take care of its Facebook page. It was the time that I found out you had to pay if you want your post be seen by more people more frequently. I didn’t have the experience with other platforms but I believe it’s the same. Paying for promotion, paying for report, paying for ad, paying for no-ad, you actually need to pay REAL MONEY on social media. It’s not much. But it’s a thing.

There’re more, like copy rights,  strategy and planing making, and social media crisis management, they all will take the money out of your pocket. However, social media is still one of the most efficient and effective ways to help your work, like I always believe, just keep one thing in mind, it’s not FREE and it’s not EASY.

Take it serious, pls!

Buckle Up! You’re Driving on A High-speed Road

Earlier in 2010, the Economist magazine called the Facebook “nation” and commented that with holding 450 million users, the Facebook would occupy the third place of world-largest-population-nation. Now, after six years, the Facebook has achieved the number as 1.79 BILLION, which has already beaten up China’s (currently has No.1 largest population) number. Over 65.9% users log onto Facebook EVERY SINGLE DAY and they generate 4.5 billion likes per day averagely. And then Twitter, with 310 million active users, it actually has over 1.3 billion accounts in total. Although the users number looks not as BIG as Facebook’s, Twitter won this game by its growth speed – it only took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to go through the 1st Tweet to the BILLIONTH. People were, and still are, crazy about this simply and convenient social medium – there were 618,725 tweets sent in a SIGNLE MINUTE during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final.

Okay, friends, I’m gonna stop the number game here. But you see, except of the Facebook and Twitter, there are YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, and so many so many others. A huge group of people are online everyday, and whether you like it or not, these social media and social media users could affect your life in any kinds of potential.

People have fun online. It is a period that you could simply pick up your phone and click “like” if you wanna keep your friendships, and start any events by 3 more clicks, and “bang,” just in 5 seconds you got all your friends invited. The web, the Internet, and these social media, really could make part of our life much more simpler and delightful, however, at the same time, could bring us some unexpected issues.

You could definitely accuse Justine Sacco because her inappropriate Tweets, but when millions and billions of accusation appearing, it could crash a person’s life. I’m not judging these users, or Justine Sacco, or the whole thing, I’m just using this example as a proof to say that a lot of people, until now, still’ve confused with these online stuff and real life, and that’s how things got out of control. Some of us always underestimate the impact of social media and the possibility that their lives would be changed by some points. Individuals life could be totally turned down once facing these social media crisis, Lindsey Stone, another major character of a social media crisis, lost her job (so did Sacco and others), and Sacco had even to deal with life-safety issue.

So does organizations. A company, an institution, or a museum, has to pay back a lot to correct their mis-convey message on social media. Any false messages, or some tricks they played to gain more audiences or potential costumes, once been sent to the public, would create some life-long damages. These organizations may start suffering and struggling for years, losing their audiences, their supporters (stockholders of companies, donators for museums), and probably their future.

Every one definitely has to pay for their mistakes. But the fact is, sometimes, these aren’t mistakes, they’re just misunderstanding or even false messages. According to Pekka Aula, social media users generate information without verified mainly. People tend to be more emotional-driven on social media. Happy, sad, and angry, we express our feeling much more strongly through social media, and the Internet magnifies them, so racists get more racial, and haters get more raged. So when mistakes, or misunderstanding happening, the situation gets more harmful.

Besides, the study of “group psychology” provides scientistic explanation of why these things happened. By naturally social influenced, people intend to join in a group and follow the leader, and online users are much more easily steered by these “big names”. If a popular YouTuber posts any comments about anything, the THING would become a focus point at least for a while. I still remember I felt so shocked and confused when watching the Season 1, Episode 11, “Infamy,” that the TV commentator indirectly killed a person. He had so much influence on the social judgement just because he was famous! And then people follow him!

Absolutely, good influence had/ve been made by social media users. We reveal truth from scandals, attract worldly attentions to endangered species, and improve racial/gender equalities by using social media. We’ve made a lot of progresses online and I believe we are making the world better. However, everyone should be aware of that all your saying will spread to every corner of the world, and would be seen by anyone. So please be buckled! Check your words and your tone! You are driving on a really high speed road and anything could happen in one second!

Cites:

1. the Economist, January 30th, 2010.
2. Pekka Aula, Social Media, Reputation Risk and Ambient Publicity Management, Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 38, No. 6, 2010, pp. 43-49.
3. Jon Ronson, How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life, The New York Times Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=2, accessed 2016.
4. The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics – Updated November 2016, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ accessed 2016.
5. 44 Titter Statistics for 2016, https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/44-twitter-stats-2016/ accessed 2016.

We, Technology, and the World – about the “Suspended Animation” in the Hirshhorn

So I was in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden today for the night’s event “MeetTheArtist,” held by one of the six artists who contributed to the “trippiest exhibition” of the Hirshhorn – the “Suspended Animation” – and as a preparation, I revisited this weird but fascinating show, again.

It was really hard to understand what was going on for the first time I saw this show. I was curious, confused, feeling weird, and even more, it really freaked me out to see the contortion of President Obama’s eyes; I mean, I thought it was the only work that was recognizable and understandable, until those unrealistic flowing eyes came out. But, the fascinating part is, every time I visited them, I made some progress, and I came to understand. It feels like seeing something through the scrim though – distanced, unreal, and tough.

I love to watch the “Emissary in the Squat of Gods,” the last piece of the whole show, created by Ian Cheng. It is a two-screen live simulation animation, with one showing a girl and an owl, and the other showing a group of people moving around. It looks like an computer game from the early 2000s – low rate, low resolution, and choppy – and characters sometimes even twisted with each other, but they are actually “alive” and moving controllably, as the label said.

I really didn’t get it at the first place. I even couldn’t understand the term of “live simulation,” even though I checked Google, and here’s the answer:

I also looked through Ian Cheng’s website, and it shows that a simulation is

game for staging “ideal + ideal = truths” processes, a mutation machine for growing 3s out of ideals, enacted at a scale that humans can perceive. Like a comedy setup or a laboratory experiment, the premise of a simulation may be artificially constrained, focused on just a few elements, or staged to confront materials that would never encounter each other in the messy wild … once a simulation begins, everything that transpires from its premise occurs truthfully, untampered by human bias or knowledge. The materials, forces, and inherent energy artificially assembled here act and react on their own terms, writing themselves, generating 1 +1 = 3 truths.

Okay, to my understanding, simulation is like creating a/some feature(s) and giving them some specific paths, and then letting them go. Their behavior will follow some pre-set logic, but no one has to control them once the show started. Like Ian’s work here, these characters – people who live next to a live volcano and the girl – they all have their own patterns of “life”. They’ve been hearing an instructive voice from time to time, but they could choose either react or not, and how to react. Especially the girl, who had been improved and programed with some “self-conscious,” was given the possibility to grow and explore, like an intellectual.

–sounds familiar, ahh?  Are you thinking the #WestWorld, like me?

Well I’ve been always interested in the computer, technology, AI, and stuff like that all the time. I, also, have been thinking the relationship between us and the computer, the internet, for awhile, and I found it was worth to ask – 1. are we really as unique as we thought? 2. are we really using the technology like we thought, or is the technology “using” us? I know it sounds stupid, but just look around and think back a little bit, could you come up with one single day that you operated normally without using any technologies?  My answer is “No,” I am now pretty much relying on my phone and my computer of everything, and as long as I want to keep my life working as usual, I have to get some help from the tech. We, the human being, now are trapped within the “Internet” that we made, and basically we live in this way unconsciously, like following some significant patterns.

Also, think about these characters in Ian’s work, they’ve created in some ways, but they do have the abilities to do choices, to learn, and to improve. This is how this “animation simulation” works, like in the real world, like they are real. When comparing them together, I couldn’t help to wringer the uniqueness of being a human – for thousands of years we consider we are different and intelligent based on the ability of learning and improving, but what if others also could do?

I would say our whole world now is about technologies, Internet, and algorithms, the expanding of knowledge has been accelerated as fast as ever, whatever we do and wherever we are, we shape ourselves to adjust the whole thing. We are curious, confused, and anxious, because we start to realize we’re not unique, we start to feel losing control.

I am neither an artist or a computer programmer, so what I’m saying here is totally based on my poor knowledge learnt online and my personal feeling towards Ian’s “Emissary in the Squat of Gods” in the Hirshhorn. Agree to this article or not, I would like to discuss it with you anytime. If you haven’t seen this exhibition, please go and visit, the show will stay there until March, 2017, and I would love to hear what do you think after.

Cites:

Alex Greenberger, "The Cyborg Anthropologist: Ian Cheng on His Sentient Artworks," ARTNEWS, accessed November 1, 2016.

Bernard Zeigler, Alexander Muzy, Levent Yilmaz, "Artificial Intelligence in Modeling and Simulation," 

iancheng.com

Sadie Dingfelder, ‘Suspended Animation’ may be the Hirshhorn’s trippiest exhibit yet, the Washington Post, accessed November 1, 2016.

“When We could Filter Everything on Social, What would Happen to Our Real Life?” – About Involving the “Negative” Social Media Users.

I just got this news that Facebook demoed a potential series of products that could filter your live videos into different fine-art appearances, which I think is really fascinating, and would be beneficial especially for museums. I’m saying this because I am a huge fan of filters and part of the reason that I love Instagram is those gorgeous filters that you could apply to your photo super easily. Also I love Prisma, not an active user though, but really enjoy the potency that you could change your photo into any of those master-drawing styles. I, personally, would be happy to see my Live video in a museum, in a crazy Vincent Van Gogh style, with showing the real Van Gogh’s paintings inside of my video probably.

“That would be fun.” I said to my friend.

“Well, right, but they’re all FAKE.” He replied, with a negative attitude towards those online social media stuff, like usual.

“Did you watch the new season of the Black Mirror? The REAL WORLD will go crazy if you guys keep doing this!” He was even more aggressive after watching this show.

I’m not a super “online” person, but I do spend a lot of time online every single day – sometimes not even intentionally, but I’ll click to check the schedule after got a notice about an event from the Facebook, or just reply a comment from my friend about anything. I show specific things I wanna show on the internet to several specific groups of people, and connect with them through these social media. I filter my life, and bridge myself with a bunch of museums, same interests museum fans, through these social media. But, as a museum major student, when I seeing my friend mention above, I couldn’t stop wondering what should museums do to reach those audiences. I mean, my friend likes museums, and would love to join in a museum event or check a new show time to time, but he actually didn’t since he is a “social-media-hater” so he barely had chance to get those information nowadays.

I think recently museums have been kinda abandoning the idea of sending mails or sharing brochures randomly  to gain audience. Everything happens online. On the social media. But the fact is, there’s still a group of people who don’t, or don’t know how to, use the social media, even more, they might hate to to use them. So museums are losing these potential audiences.

To fix this awkward situation, I would say, let’s look back to the topics about the content of the social media posts at first. – Are we bothering audiences with tons of posts? Shall we just give some of our followers the straight information about shows and events, instead of “filtering everything”?

I don’t know if it’s possible, or even happening to museums, that to divide their followers (online audiences who are also potential on-site audiences) into different groups while they could choose to follow in several specific ways, like some could be “would like to see everything,” “only notice me with new shows and events,” or even “only notice me when anything happens to XXX (XXX refers to a specific exhibit, event, program, or an artist).” Does it necessary at all? Coz I totally understand it gonna be a lot of extra works.

Also, I would to say to museums, please don’t discard all the print-information, like posters and brochures, coz sometime people still need them! I, literally, came across the really awkward situation for several times, about apologizing to these audiences who requested for a brochures of the event schedule while I was working at the information desk in the Hirshhorn, and suggesting them to check our website or follow our Facebook. But, I mean, it’s really weird to say “you could check online” while we were actually talking face-to-face! It is like telling a new friend “please don’t look at my face right now, go to check my filtered photos on the Instagram! That’s ‘real’ me!”

So, let’s keep using the social media, but also stay in the real world, okay?

What Do I Want from a Museum’s Social Media?

As a museum lover and an exhibit-holic, I’ve been visiting these on-site exhibitions in different museums consistently and following all my favorite museums on the social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Not really surprisedly, these museums are all doing the social media stuff in different ways. Take two of my favorite museums as examples:

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

It has 5 social media accounts at the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. Although you can tell they have different directions and kinda work for different purposes, their contents are actually really similar, or at least connected, with each other.

For example, for the new exhibition opened last week, they have 5 posts on Facebook, 7 posts on Instagram, 63 poster on Twitter (I know it’s crazy! It took me 5 min to count it out!!!), and zero post on YouTube from its opening date, Oct. 14, to now (Oct. 18).

Its Facebook posts are pretty “official,” simple captures with images related to the new exhibit and some direct information. 4 of them have links to different articles talking about the new show, and only 1 is about the Friday Gallery Talk for this show.

The Instagram posts are also doing the similar thing – introducing the new exhibit and promoting the Friday Gallery talks. They all have the same hashtag #RegnarKjartansson but using different images, undoubtedly including these two images that’ve been used for Facebook posts but also some visitor-view photos of the show, a portrait of Ragnar Kjatansson himself, and photos taken during his interview. These multiple perspective photos with plenty of different hashtags decreased the gaps between the museum, the artist, and the audiences, and worked well to encourage more people walking into the museum and enjoying the show.

The museum Twitter has been crazy active. It retweeted 41 tweets related to this new show from the museum director, curators, art critics, news, and normal visitors. It gathered all the information, views, and critiques together like a binding book and let the audience choose what do they want to know. It also served as an interactive zone to communicate with various of audiences to hear and share their ideas.

So personally, I think the Hirshhorn did a really great job with spreading information at different social media platforms. Although the contents of its posts are kind of similar (same images and even same phrases), but they do have different concentrations and purposes. However, my another favorite museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery uses social media in a different way.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery (SAAM)

Like I listed on the former blog, it has 15 different social media accounts covering Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Blog, Flickr, iTunes U, YouTube, Art Babble, and Pinterest, with separate accounts for the museum, the Lunder Conservation Center, and the Luce Foundation Center. They barely had the “same” or even similar contents on different posts and all its social media work for their distinct missions.

Like, its @americanart account on Twitter and Facebook only post information about exhibitions (the recent posts are all about Renwick Gallery only!), @LunderConservationCenter only posts about the conservation works, @LuceFoundation only posts events, and its Flickr account has been posting these incredible high-resolution images of its collection for years. So basically, you could find all the information you may interested from its social media – you just need to go to different places.

So clearly, the Hirshhorn and the SAAM have different social media posting concepts. While the Hirshhorn is providing the same information slightly different at all its social media platforms in order to get all the social media users attentions, the SAAM is focusing to distinguish its different functions through different accounts and social media platforms. So which one is better? – it’s really hard to say, but I would say I appreciate the effort of making things clearly and holding the concept of giving the audiences “private rooms,” however, I really don’t want to follow ten different accounts only to get one single museum. With following a museum’s social media, I WISH I could get all the information about exhibitions, artists, events, programs, EASILY and QUICKLY, and could have the space to talk with the museum and other fans. That’s my personal preference of using all the museums’ social media, but how do you think? Which way do you prefer? Or did you find there’s another better way?

Do We Really Need ALL of these Social Media?

I’ve been always considering myself as a non-social-media person and I believed if I only check Facebook for one time per day, snapchat with friends for a sec, and post one delicious food shoot on Insta, it won’t be a big deal coz it only takes a few minutes. BUT the truth is, it is not “minutes,” it is “HOURS.” So I was surprised when realized the Smithsonian American Art Museum & the Renwick Gallery (SAAM) had 15 social media accounts, and even shocked after found out there were only 4 people on the social media team.

It is reasonable that SAAM has more – it has separate social accounts for the Lunder Conservation Center, the Luce Foundation Center, and the robot (PaikBot) – but still, I’m really wondering how could these 4-people-team take care of 15 social media accounts at the same time? & Are they really all necessary?

So I looked through all these account and this was how my chrome looks like –

 

and here’s the numbers –

• Twitter 1 @americanart (the Smithsonian American Art Museum & the Renwick Gallery): about 8 yrs old, 6,366 tweets, 67.9k followers, 4,159 likes, 4 tweets for the past week – all about exhibits in the Renwick Gallery
• Twitter 2 @lunder (Lunder Conservation Center): also 8 yrs old, 651 tweets, 4,348 followers, (only) 53 likes, 1 tweet for the past week – a video showing the conservation process preparing for a coming exhibition.
• Twitter 3 @PaikBot: launched in 2012, 892 tweets, 652 followers, and 74 likes, but the latest tweet was on Sept. 7, 2014.
• Facebook 1 @americanart: 58,304 page likes, 40,052 check-in, 1 post for the past week – an event at the Renwick Gallery.
• Facebook 2 @americanartluce (Luce Foundation Center of American Art): 2,549 likes, 9 post (the winner👑!!!) – 6 about upcoming events, 1 visitor post, and 2 objects introductions.
• Facebook 3 @LunderConservationCenter: 2,252 likes, 41 check-in, 1 post which is the same video tweet.
• Tumblr 1 (American Art Tumblr): looks really fancy and has multiple contents – events, exhibits, etc. but averagely only posted 3 times for a month.
• Tumblr 2 (Luce Foundation Tumblr): more old school style, only post object’s image + it’s capture.
• Instragram @americanartmuseum: 442 posts, 17.3k followers, only 4 posts for the past week, but used #hushtags and kinda created a meme based on one of its collection.
• Blog @Eye Level: a long blog about its new Visual Reality APP for the past exhibition, Wonder, for the past week.
• Flickr @americanartmuseum: 1k follower, has 74 albums and over 1,000 images.
• iTunes U: can’t open it, not sure how it looks like.
• You Tube @Smithsonian American Art Museum: 577 videos.
• Art Babble@Smithsonian American Art Museum: 372 videos, similar to You Tube. (different profile photo)
• Pinterest @Smithsonian American Art Museum: 58 boards, 2.2k pins, 2 likes, 4.2k followers.

I can totally understand why they have so much accounts, like it introduces on its web:

The Luce Foundation Center for American Art, the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, allows visitors to browse thousands of artworks from the collection. It adjoins the Lunder Conservation Center, which is shared with the National Portrait Gallery, the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of museums.

The unique feature of the Luce Foundation Center and the dual-identity of the Lunder Conservation Center made this museum believed they all need their own accounts, but REALY? Do people really need to go to different accounts every time to check out stuffs actually belong to one museum? Does the museum really need to put so much work on maintaining so many different social media platforms?

Since the museum has too many social media serving for different sections, all the information the museum posted were scattering around, and you may have to check at least 2 or 3 places to get the information you want. Generally, the basic needs of people using social media are 1. seeking and sharing information, 2. social interacting and networking, 3. relaxing, 4. entertaining, so if a person needs to spend 30 min to check multiple platforms to get what he wants, I guess, this museum social accounts wouldn’t be considered as useful and efficient. Also, if the museum only post really limited kinds of information at these specific social accounts, it wouldn’t be considered as an effective way to promote itself.

I am not say SAAM is doing “wrong” – they actually did a really great job on the Instagram and Tumblr, and I personally really like their blog “Eye Level,” I only think it would be better if they could trim some unnecessary accounts and merge some small ones into the “Big official one”@americanartmuseum. Then, the museum and its audiences could spend less time, gain more information, why not, right?

Methods? or Contents? Thoughts About Making an Exhibition.

As I mentioned at my first blog About, I am a MSTD student on the track of exhibition design, and I’m taking classes from Corcoran design school. Honestly, for me, it is a little tricky to be a design focused student at an academic program and my life is kinda split up due to the different concentrations between these two groups –

Like, while my Exhibition Development class of MSTD required us to build up an exhibition whatever we were interested and handed in the final project with PAPERS, the Environmental Design class of Corcoran encouraged us to set up a museum, of course with its sample exhibition, by IMAGES and MODELS. It’s like answering two different questions if you wanna a new exhibit – what to present? how to present? And as you can figure out, these question are exactly my blog’s title – method? or content?

Firstly, I think we all agree that exhibition is an essential part of a museum. If we look through these museum mission statement, we’d find out, whatever this museum is or aims to, “exhibits” alway takes a place there. Undoubtedly, exhibition itself also has a “mission statement.” Like the National Museum of Australia states that:

The National Museum of Australia is committed to interpreting and communicating what it means to be an Australian and to explore its consequences for all Australians…One of the main vehicles by which the Museum delivers these messages is through its exhibition program…This policy recognizes the national focus of the Museum’s role, and the need to deliver exhibitions through a network of venues and by the innovative use of new and emerging technologies, as well as by traditional methods. It also recognizes the importance of community involvement in the development and delivery of the Museum’s exhibition program.

While the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, emphasizes:

Exhibition: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, strives to be among the nation’s dynamic art museums by exhibiting its permanent collection and special exhibitions on widely diverse subjects in ways that combine the highest aesthetic standards with engaging and intellectually accessible presentations.

Reading these two statements, I have this feeling that an “exhibition” is both a “content” and a “method.” It usually has a concept, numbers of objects, texts, media, and a/multiple story(ies). Also it is also a method for a museum to present its value and ideas, to convey information, to engage audiences, and to communicate with the local community or the whole outside world. So which aspect do you think is more important?

Well, before answer this question, please think about one of your favorite exhibition and tell me why you love it:

• Is this because it’s your favorite topic?
• Because the fascinating story that the exhibition tells?
• Or it shows objects you’re extremely interested/have connection with?
• Made by your favorite artist? Organized and shown by your favorite museum?
• Or because it’s easy/pleasing to understand due to the interpretive methods (print/audio/mobile/human guide)?
• Do you like it just because it’s beautiful (color codes/label fonts/lights)?
• Or has “cool” display and interpretive methods?
• Has amazing an interactive zone?

I know the reason for “loving an exhibit” usually would be omnifarious. But if you give the positive answer for the first four questions more, you may be a “content-focused” person, inversely, if you more tend to looking for an exhibition due to the last three clauses, you may be a “method-focused” person, like me lol.

Then, the question is, if audiences always have different focusing/fonding points, which one would a museum pay more attention while making an exhibition?

In my opinion, nowadays, every museum should work hard to create/utilize more intriguing method while doing an exhibition. A glass showcase display could be a “classic” but also a “cliché,” and if a museum still ONLY stick to “normal” “standard” exhibition, uhhh, I admire you, you’re pride and brave.

LACMA’s snap photo, link from the Independent

People are always seeking for “cool” and “funny” stuff. While the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) turning their classic art works into funny memes and gaining over 60,000 views for each single snapchat post, I believe that using social media would be an inevitable method to support an exhibition. Same as the current public enthusiasm for interactive exhibition and digital exhibition, before this summer, to be a little ashamed, I never heard about Somerset House, London, and suddenly I got tons of information about its new digital show, Björk Digital, because there were sooooooo many tweets talking about this cool show which based on Visual Reality technology.

24 hour hackathon of Photo Hack Day

I’m not saying that all the museum should abandon their traditional exhibitions and pursue those high-technologic, social media-drived shows, instead, I surely agree that museums should keep doing research and improving the content of their exhibitions, cause that’s the soul of the whole institution after all. The VR expertise, @kylerbussell, also mentioned that even VR is actually just a tool, the only way to keep it growing is adding more information and making it “useful.”

All in all, whatever a content of an exhibit, or a method to show an exhibit, all actually aim providing a better experience for the audience. While a fashion, intriguing, multiple media, and high technologic exhibit method would definitely attract more new audience, especially those young individuals and teenagers,  a brilliant, thorough exhibit content would keep its audience and urge them coming back. The content and method is definitely not incompatible with each other, contrarily, they will eventually work together to make our museum&exhibition world better.

 

 

The Power of Museums and the Internet

One of the biggest news for the past few days, in my opinion, is the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African and American History and Culture, and I feel so lucky that the whole thing happened while I am here, in Washington D.C. I’ve seen this dramatic building on my way to school every day and even had a chance to visit the under-construction site last year thanks to my professor Martha Morris and her awesome class-Building Museum. I have to admit I’ve been totally obsessed with this beautiful deep-brown building, which rises up by three inverted-pyramid tiers and is covered by hollowed-out metal panels. Moreover, as President Obama stated at the opening ceremony – “This place is more than a building. It is a dream come true,” the most exciting part of the museum is its content – its exhibition.

Me at the rooftop of the NMAAHC when it was under construction.

Thankfully, I went to the NMAAHC yesterday with my friend Joyska (who brought me the advanced ticket! Thank you!) and Matthew, and I have to warn you my friends, who haven’t visited yet, that these exhibits inside are not all as pretty as its container, the building. With more than 36,000 artifacts, various perspective stories, and unique space, the museum and its “unvarnished truth” may be too harsh and will  tear your heart apart (Yes I cried, more than once). I would not to share what it looks like here because I highly encourage you to visit there by yourself. But here’re some photos as a preview:

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Since I could only stay for a couple of hours, sadly I didn’t finish the whole museum. But as far as I visited, the three-ground history gallery, I think the museum really does a great job and all the exhibits I’ve been to were very impressive. From the anomalistic rooms to the dark narrow tunnel, the relentless wave sounds to the mourning quotes, and the rusted shackles to the protest signs, the museum provides audiences an all-round, multi-angle view to look back and experience the African American’s history. Also because the way that NMAAHC shows all the history in chronological order and kind of integrated, the whole exhibition becomes more complex with multiple feelings. Like, when we got to the early 20th, we felt so happy due to the jazz music and almost danced for a while, but right after that, these objects carrying the heavy history shown up again and it made me feel much more sad. These sharp turnings appeared for a lot of times and impressed me deeply.

(Inevitably, as a museum nerd and an exhibit-holic, I had several conversations with my friends about the exhibition design’s score points and drawbacks. Although the whole exhibition is definitely successful, one thing really bothered me – there was no “no flash” sign and these precious old paper books were completely exposed under the extremely bright lights. Also it was really hard to read from these crystal-like transparent panels in the middle of the room – you could find this photo from the former slide show.)

Also, I joined the Freedom Sounds music festival at the National Mall at the museum opening night which was really exciting as well! Not very surprisedly, one of my companies, who is not a “museum person”, was completely shocked by this big ceremony and its influence. I mean, yeah, thousands of people gathering under the Washington Monument and celebrating for a new museum’s opening is definitely not a everyday’s thing. But he also noticed me that it was not only about people who physically got there, there were more and more people on the internet to view, spread, and talk about this news. – It is very true!

Just like all the other aspects, the NMAAHC putted a lot of energy on social media and the results are good. As a brand new museum, it has a website, a Mobile APP, and official accounts for most of the major social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a lot of related #hushtags. The NMAAHC APP could be found and downloaded from the APP store and it’s really easy to use for navigation and getting updated information, and it supports MULTIPLE LANGUAGES!

Also, till I started writing this blog, its Facebook page already has 218,944 likes and more than 333K people viewed the NMAAHC Grand Opening Dedication Ceremony there. Its Instagram account has 50.4K followers and there’re 20,119 posts #nmaahc and 10,362 posts #apeoplesjourney, and its Twitter account has 66.5K followers already!

All these numbers demonstrated the museum and all the advocates’ efforts, and also proved the influence of the Internet. We are living in an age that information could reach all over the world through internet at a fast speed ever. @40deuce used to do an analysis about How Fast the News Spreads Through Social Media and the result was astonishing! He took the news of Bin Laden’s death as the sample and it turned out over 40,000 blog postS, news articles, and 2.2 million tweets coming out talking about this news within 12 hours!

An unprecedented museum shows the unforgettable history, the exuberant culture, and brave human beings, and it engaged/engages millions of people – this is the power of the museum. But all these news, blogs, articles, all the FB, Insta, Twitter’s posts and followers, and all the consistent support and attention, show the power of the Internet. I think if museums could accurately and positively take advantage of the Internet, better results will always come out.