The digital age is a networked space of individuals, places, and information that flow together. Within this global, distributed space lies the museum as one of its active nodes. The space of the new museology is similarly de-centered and nonlinear, as museums adapt their traditional roles and practices to this changing cultural environment. Recent developments in mobile telecommunications, wireless technology, Web 2.0, and geospatial technology, contribute to a dispersed museum experience in the digital age with authority and interpretation also dispersed onto the visitor. Yet despite shifting away from their local, physical museum spaces, museums are not disregarding their local communities or their physical collections and spaces, but rather are undertaking a synthesized vision of local and global, fixed and mobile, physical and virtual, hegemony and populism. Through their use of technology today, museums disregard the limitations of these traditional binary terms, focusing more on visitor interests and affinities that provide strong bonds to the museum and cultivate social relations.
This thesis analyzes five case studies of art museums in the United States that are remarkable for their innovative uses of technology (onsite and online). Each museum was analyzed regarding the relation to its physical locality, its online use of technology (website, blogs, social media), onsite use of technology, and through individual interviews. While these cases illustrate the most pioneering uses of technology in art museums today, their significance lie rather in understanding the cultural and localized contextualization of how they use technology. The new museology places a priority on serving and engaging community, yet defining one’s community becomes challenging in the digital age, despite the reductionist efforts of visitor-centric museums. Each museum has its own trend-setting story to tell about its own places, communities, cultures, and how technology is applied towards those ends. To understand museums in the digital age is to understand the interrelation of their local and global places, communities, and cultures, and to all the points and flows of interaction within their distributed network.
