Social Media and Art Museums – Authoritarian and Self-Promoting Friends?
The emergence of social media has been associated with the rise of ‘prosumers,’ that is, users who do not simply consume content but also produce it. Where it concerns art museums usage of social media, it appears that such institutions face considerable challenges, perhaps due to an ingrained tendency to treat social media platforms as marketing channels rather than interaction spaces. At least, this is the suggestion of Schick and Damkjaer (2010), whose article analyzes 39 Danish state-subsidized art museums’ Facebook activities. The authors argue that with art musems in Facebook, ‘an actual prosumer culture has barely come into existence,’ suggesting as an explanation that ‘the art museums are mainly practicing monologue instead of dialogue, not encouraging the users to interact and participate.’ Thus they characterize such institutions as ‘authoritarian and self-promoting friends,’ who fail to understand how to use ‘Facebook on the medium’s own terms.’
One wonders if this observation might be extended to the use art museums have made of another popular social media platform, Twitter? While there are certainly museums which do evidence reasonable engagement with Twitter users, there are far more that appear to use the medium simply as a marketing channel. Where interactions are apparent in the timelines of art museums, many appear to be confined to the promoting of exhibitions and events, with very little evidence of interactions that may be considered to contribute much of cultural or theoretical significance. Have a look at the MOMA and Tate timelines for example.
The larger question on my mind however, is whether the notion of a burgeoning prosumer culture associated with social media platforms is accurate? After all, there are lurkers aplenty in both Facebook and Twitter, users who produce minimal content, some who in fact limit their activities to favoriting tweets, without ever creating a tweet themselves, and some who never bother to reply to comments/tweets. This is not to say that there are no prosumers whatsoever, its clear that there are. Its more a questioning of the extent to which social media platforms facilitate the production of content by ordinary users, and not only superficial tweets and comments, but meaningful interactions that linger on in one’s mind for days or weeks… It is also to question whether social media is necessarily interactive, as there are many groups of users who behave like the art museums Schick and Damkjaer describe, academics or celebrities for example, ‘as authoritarian and self-promoting friends.’