Virtual museum shouldn’t take the place of hands-on experience
Going too digital will turn otherwise interesting exhibits into a video game
Digital, digital, digital. It is the mantra of our age, rendering all else in culture passé or anachronistic.
Mélanie Joly, the able minister of heritage, thinks about digital technology “first and foremost. I’m a product of my generation,” she told The Globe and Mail.
As the leading face of a new government celebrating youth and ambition, Joly, 37, must think about the virtual world. But there is a danger of thinking too much.
In books, for example, the digital frontier is receding. Once, we were all supposed to be reading e-books — if we were reading books at all. Today, e-books represent 18 per cent of the market.
In universities, students reject digital textbooks. Distracted by Snapchat and Facebook, they appreciate the safe space of the unwired world. If they want that book and their pencilled marginalia in 10 years, they will find it on the bookshelf, not lost in the hard drive of an obsolete technology. Taking notes, too, is done more effectively with pen on paper, another reason professors are declaring classrooms an electronics-free zone.
Quality magazines succeed. One is Monocle, a monthly smorgasbord of global affairs, culture, commerce and design published in Britain. Readers love the tactile, visual and olfactory sense of reading something elegant.
It is museums, however, where the faddish obsession with digital thrives. While our national museums understand the virtual world, they also understand they should collect and display things. When the new Canada Hall in the Museum of Canadian History reopens after its $25-million renovation, it will have digital elements, of course, but it will also emphasize artifacts over replicas. This speaks to the need to understand the authentic. Not virtual, real.
This apparently unsettles Alex Benay, president and CEO of the Canada Science and Technology Museum. He is the Disciple of Digital.
Benay sees the future of museums less in objects under glass than in characters on a screen, preferably viewed through a virtual-reality headset. It doesn’t matter if anyone goes to museums anymore because, hey, just turn on your laptop and you’re there, from anywhere.
“You can go and look at the train, but if you get to live the experience … that’s a better emotional home run for a visitor,” he declares. “Attendance as a measure of success is outdated.”
As it happens, Benay’s museum has had the lowest attendance of the top four museums (history, war, nature, science) in Ottawa. This is not Benay’s fault. Fifty years old, the museum sits in a decaying former bakery on ugly St. Laurent Boulevard.
Rather than building a new science museum downtown, the last government decided to renovate this one. Benay became president in 2014. He worked in government before joining Open Text. He has an undergraduate degree in history. His predecessor, Denise Amyot, brought several degrees and a long career in government.
Benay is all digital, all the time. As a 30-something, with the confidence of his generation, it’s all he seems to know. Perhaps he thinks this is what Minister Joly (who appears, oddly, in his profile picture on Twitter) wants to hear. To his 978 followers there, he gushes about the “immersive” and “interactive” experience of the renovated science museum.
His case for digital is as persuasive as hotels asking guests to use their towels a second day to save the environment (rather than save them money). Another view is that museums are places to see, touch and hear, and too much digital will turn them into a video game, offering no reason to leave home.
That’s what’s wrong with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. It has so little on display that Victor Rabinovitch, who ran the former Canadian Museum of Civilization, astutely calls it less a museum than “a centre.” It’s more ideas than things.
Yes, we’re all digital citizens. But like all changes in life, managing this reality needs wisdom and maturity. And a little humility, too.