Introduction and context
Mediation of cultural content can be done in a variety of manners. Nowadays, the widescale adoption of technological progress in our everyday life can also be noticed, rather frequently, in exhibitions. Nevertheless, there are still cases where the visitor is simply and classically presented the heritage items as such, accompanied just by textual information, possibly some graphic details which make the text more relevant, but without technical inputs.
If such an approach is acceptable for the 50+ visitors, the younger public is very likely to be less satisfied. The digital natives (Millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alpha) are much more acquainted with the use of digital devices, compared to the digital immigrants, people who have grown up with analogic technologies and have come to learn how to use digital ones in their adult age. Moreover, their expectations in the exhibition spaces are different and the cultural offer has to take this into account.
Practical examples
Digitalization has expanded so much into our lives these last decades and the cultural sphere has just followed the trend to such an extent in the developed countries that already in 2005, in the exhibition Pablo. Der Private Picasso: Le Musée Picasso à Berlin opened at the Neue Nationalgalerie, one could see cultural mediators wearing T-shirts marked “live guides” obviously as opposed to the audio guides so fashionable at the time.
Other ways of providing digital content to accompany the visitors along their itinerary in the museums include info kiosks, touch tables, audio/video corners with headphones and screens, VR, AR, and, of course, the multitude of applications that can be downloaded on one’s own smartphone. Beyond the simple provision of information, which is a must in today’s knowledge-based society, interaction, gamification and immersion, targeted to the various age categories, contribute to improving the experience and better remembering the acquired data for the long term.
For instance, at the Futurium in Berlin, visitors are constantly invited to interact with the exhibited content by means of a necklace token, and at the end of the visit they receive a bookmark which contains the link to the place where their reactions are stored for a period of time.
Similarly, in the Berlin Global exhibition at the Humboldt Forum, visitors receive at the entrance a token bracelet, which again stores their reactions throughout the visit and before exiting they are shown to which visitor category they belong.
Moreover, at the end of the Homo Ludens exhibition at the Caixa Forum in Madrid, in the autumn of 2021, visitors would be told their interest and proficiency in video gaming.
Key takeaways and closing
Furthermore, digital mediation in museum contexts usually comes along with a series of advantages such as advanced knowledge of the public preferences, and this can be done in a manner that points out to the user the fact that he/she falls within a certain category of reactions, while other people have different perceptions and responses, or, the collected data can be simply interpreted statistically and further used in designing future events that would take into account what the majority would expect. While both options are valid and useful, it can be argued that the first one has an implicit educative role on the path of tolerance as it just shows that there are people who think and act differently and it is ok to be so. Another advantage of digital mediation is that each user can very easily set the level of information he/she is willing to acquire, as well as the topic, unlike the face-to-face human mediation which may be very strictly time-framed and also quite rigidly thematically oriented.
In terms of disadvantages, one may think of the costs and time needed for the production of the applications and for the purchase of the devices where to run them physically in the museum space, resources being pretty much different from one country to another, or even from a bigger museum to a smaller museum. Another disadvantage is the rather rapid change of technologies, both in terms of hardware and of software, a situation that may diminish quite quickly the usefulness of the respective investments. To this one may add that the staff not trained enough in digital mediation, as it may be the case in many museums and cultural organizations.