Museum Talk 2.0

For long, museums have been major authorities in the art world. Now, museums are increasingly opening up to their public under the pressures of reduced state funding and retreating interest. Especially social media has been embraced for this purpose, allowing dialogues with museum audiences. Within an increasingly competitive and global museum field, ‘accessibility’ has become a pivotal term, even though it threatens to break down the high barriers of entry of traditional cultural institutions with their large capital of expertise and networks. While studies on popular culture have a more vast understanding of the impact of the participatory culture on experts and expertise in the online space, there is a dearth of literature on the high culture spectrum of the Web. Therefore, this thesis will situate the current debate in the museum field within the framework provided by the current literature on popular culture, Web 2.0 and expertise. The main research question here is what constitutes as effective museum blogs in the blogosphere, i.e. what makes them so popular? Specifically, this thesis aims to address three issues: who are the actors in the museum blogosphere?; what is the nature of expertise on these blogs?; and what culture do these spaces develop? The working dynamics in museums has shifted from the curator as the sole driving force to a shared position with new museum professionals like educators and marketing officers. Against this background new actors can now enter the online museum space, either as amateur experts or communities of interest. The analysis of the top ten ranked museum blogs on BlogRank reveals fierce competition between single professionals, museums and communities in the blogosphere. Traditional discourses of expertise coexist online with individual interpretations of laypersons and independent professionals. The blogging format also permits institutions and individuals alike to personalize their content, which may point to a creation of a culture on Web 2.0 platforms that value personal accounts, local knowledge and trustworthy persons. Other than is to be expected from museum blogs, content does not only revolve around ‘core products’ like art, but also address niche issues. Institutional museum blogs may still reflect traditional museum spaces, which are perceived as closed and elitist, but the analysis of the socio-technical architecture shows that this largely depends on the extent to which the blog space allows digital participation. In sum, single blogs act as expert filters, institutional museum blogs use an authoritative though personal voice to engage their audience, and community blogs resemble repositories of knowledge in the collection, production and dissemination of expert or amateur capital.