Table of Contents
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3
The internet and the spread of Art ……………………………………………………………………………………3
The Google Art Projecct …………………………………………………………………………………………………9
Controversies ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….11
What remains to be done? …………………………………………………………………………………………13
Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………14
References……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………17
Introduction
Currently, the major museums in the world are undergoing a profound change as they have identified the importance of reaching for a global audience. With this, however, the museums’ management necessarily becomes more complex and multiaspec t. This essay will focus on this new goal, and particularly on the use of digital museum experiences as a way to achieve it. It will discuss why the digital museum tends to be a trend of museum development, how the art institutions use digital media to increase their influence to the public, and the problems derived from this new trend.
The Internet and the spread of art
In the age of information explosion, science is developing and knowledge is renewing itself rapidly. Already in 1992 the Global Information Infrastructure Plan recognized that “the information society has become a major objective of worldwide public interest” (Takahashi, et al.). Now, with the expansion of the Internet, this objective is a reality, at least in developed countries. According to the World Bank (2010), Australia’s percentage of Internet users went from 5% in 1992 to 75.9% in 2010. With this new tool, people gain access to knowledge that was previously unreachable, and those interested in spreading it have become much better equipped to do so. Steven Zucker’s, principal of Smarthistory.org and Ddean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) describes this transformation in information as going “from Acropolis—that inaccessible treasury on the fortified hill—to Agora, a marketplace of ideas offering space for conversation, a forum for civic engagement and debate, and opportunity for a variety of encounters among audiences” (Proctor, 2010). Even if it is clear that Australia is changing much more rapidly than the rest of the word, it can be seen in the graph below that this is, in fact, a global trend.
Fig: Internet users as percentage of population
Furthermore, not only has the Internet grown exponentially, it has also replaced traditional media as the main source of information for many sectors of the population. Roy Morgan Research points out that while the percentage of people that use TV as the main source of information has been consistently decreasing to only 52% in 2007; the percentage of people who use the Internet to inform themselves has been increasing, reaching a level of 9.5% . But, more importantly, if these trends continue the Internet will become the main source of information for 50% of Australians in under ten years. (Roy Morgan, 2007). These figures are even more extreme among the young (15 to 25 years old) where 79% of them already depend solely on the Internet to inform themselves (Wattenberg, 2011). This evolution of the media is so clear that most newspaper reproduce the entirety of their daily prints on their website and most major TV networks are starting to rebroadcast their contents online. It not only allows them to keep up high visibility but it also provides an extremely high return of investment since the costs of entry are relatively low and the audience is constantly increasing. Under these considerations it is can be seen that the common phrase “if it exists, it’s in Google” is no exaggeration.
Museums have caught up with this trend and are starting to have a stronger presence on the Internet. For example, in its strategy for 2012, the British Museum recognized that Internet exposure is central to increasing the interests in the museum’s collections. It even went to state that “by 2012, the Museum’s
