Thursday, March 19, 2009

Lascaux


The title of this blog is a bit misleading: I am not interested in how museums communicate but, rather, how museum professionals communicate, educate and inspire everyone else based on the mission, vision and program of their museum. I am going to go out on a (rather short, I think) limb and say that everything, everything, we have and do is a product of communication. 

The main thrust of this forthcoming essay is toward communication technologies. We are all caught up in technology right now, especially this web 2.0 business, but we need to remember that this blog, that tweet, those facebook and myspace pages, all those wikis and the innumerable photos posted to flickr are only the most recent expression of our collective drive to make our communication more permanent, more immediate, and more interactive.

The cave paintings in Lascaux, France are a 32,000 year old communique to someone. They are definitely permanent, but not so immediate or interactive:

Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt demonstrates a more immediate and interactive form of communication, but letters are not very permanent (unless you're Einstein).


My Twitter feed (which you can check out in the sidebar) is immediate and somewhat interactive, but its hardly permanent.  

Each method of communication is valuable for a different reason, and people will certainly prefer one method to the exclusion of others.  It is important to recognize that all communication technologies work toward the same goal, but achieve that impact in different ways.

Both of the images used in this post are in the public domain, accessed via wikipedia.org.

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