Social Dynamics, Web 2.0 and the Collaborative Museum

I have recently read with great interest the edited volume "The Social Dynamics of Web 2.0: Interdisciplinary Perspectives", edited by Charalambos Tsekeris and Ioannis Katerelos, and originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences.

The volume seeks to put into perspective recent paradigms on the social dynamics that are, allegedly, encouraged by Web 2.0 as a social arena for contact and exchange: among them, networking above and beyond one's physical surroundings; grassroots initiative as the dominant creative paradigm; the empowering of claims to democracy and social justice that actors can strategically coordinate through social networking.

Overall, the volume can be said to cover exhaustively, and very well, ground that has already been threaded in a myriad publications, and upon which little remains to be said - at least from the vantage point of the advocative perspective that most contributors to the volume implicitly adopt. Scholarly audiences, the likely recipients of this edited volume, hardly need an introduction reminding them time after time that Web 2.0 is, for better or for worse, a revolutionary paradigm in online networking, and social interaction in general; neither needs reinforcing the, by now one should hope, well ingrained idea that Web 2.0 itself, like most paradigms, should not be argued for in messianic terms (at least within serious academic enquiry).

The real strength of this collection, its tangible contribution to knowledge is found, rather than in by now familiar content, in the relevant and fresh methodological approaches some of the contributors bring to the table. The one that impressed me most positively, and that I see as easily replicable within a museum studies context, is Martin Berg's "Social intermediaries and the location
of agency: a conceptual reconfiguration of social network sites": a way of framing system oriented and user oriented research that could just as well apply to 'museum studies' versus 'visitor studies'.

Berg argues that current research into SNS (Social Network Sites) is somewhat polarised in approach and understanding of perspectives when it comes to discussing sociality in networks. On one hand, sometimes the user is put at the centre of the equation, so that an 'instrumental view of Web 2.0', one that focuses on how 'agency is located at the level of individual users'; but another, more pessimistic strand of research focuses instead on an 'institutional view', according to which 'Web 2.0 applications... are assumed to commercially deploy their users as objects of inquiry and sources of information', often exploiting users in the process (Berg, 2012).

What Berg seems to take issue with, is the low degree of compenetration that these two lines of inquiry display: they are usually explored independently, assuming an either/or bias in which the user is either master of the universe, or a slave to corporate/institutional ends. He then suggests that we should rather talk of 'social intermediaries': a conceptualisation that 'while it is important to recognise that SNS allow for a certain amount of interactivity along with certain exploitative practices, neither of these divergent approaches account for how SNS assume a functional position within the social realm' (Berg, 2012). Thinking of the social network experience as based upon intermediarity, and the competing yet mutually necessary interests of the user and the institution, leads to a more holistic paradigm; rationalising the existence, in the same loci, of the user's Web 2.0-empowered agency, and the institution's regulatory and structuring efforts. Additionally a new subject of research is created. the 'relationship itself' as the meeting point, the agora of users and institution within true networking, which can then be explored according to whichever quantitative or qualitative parameter seems appropriate.

Martin Berg's chapter interests me as a museologist because I see, more often than not, the same divide within research in museum studies. Scholarship either takes the 2.0 visitor, be her physical or online, as the exclusive shaper of the museum experience, to which collection, education, and 'the museum' in general are accessory and subservient, if not supine; or, more rarely, the museum lingers as the 'institutional machine' looming over the visitor, busily enforcing its own authority and expertise. What museum scholarship should learn from Berg's framework is that them museum, while not a social networking site, at its interactive best functions as a 'site of networking'; rather than focusing on the visitor over the institution, or the institution over the visitor, it is the meeting point, the 'intermediarity' between the two that should be more often, and more fully explored.

- Berg, Martin. "Social intermediaries and the location of agency: a conceptual reconfiguration of social network sites." Contemporary Social Science 7.3 (2012): 321-333.