Guidelines for Web Utopia: "Il Museo e la Rete: Nuovi Modi di Comunicare."

This post, and the ones to soon follow, will constitute a sort of paradigm shift for me, away from longer updates with long breaks in between, toward shorter and more frequent updates. I have realised that, save a few instances, the longer format I have been using so far was lacking both the depth of a full-fledged article; and the concise impact of... well, a blog post. From now on my aim will be to update quite more frequently, perhaps weekly, with shorter reaction pieces, reviews, critiques and nuggets of research as a way to inform in a more agile manner.

A few weeks ago, in the Facebook group for ICOM Veneto, a meaty document titled "Il Museo e la Rete: Nuovi Modi di Comunicare" was circulated; it constitutes, if not a first, at least the current state of the art in the formalized discussion of the Italian situation for what concerns museums and digital media. After a brief introduction to general themes and issues, the document (produced by Fondazione Fitzcarraldo, an independent consultancy) presents a lengthy selection of case studies from Italy and beyond.

One of the first questions everyone, including me, gets asked at a museum conference is usually a variation of 'why are you interested in museums?' A question that, perhaps unlike others, I usually find relatively easy to answer. Essentially, it is not museums that I am interested in, as they simply happen to be one of the privileged loci in which many of the dynamics I am actually interested in unfold: namely, the utopia drive and its connections to technocratism and the digital media; the articulation of ideologies through jargon and expression as employed in programmatic documents; the construction and conceptualisation of improvement and remediation. Before I settled on discussing the Smithsonian Institution's Wiki as a main case study, for part of my dissertation I mostly concentrated upon digital strategies as manifestos, exploring qualitatively (lacking the quantitative instruments) the ins and outs of the language they employed and how it, essentially, carris a certain technology-inflected ideology that is then translated into a worldview. A piece I spent various months on was, in fact, the Tate Online's Digital Strategy - in its various iterations, a document that "Il Museo e La Rete..." often refers back to as the state of the art in digital strategies.

This is certainly true in the sense that Fondazione Fitzcarraldo's document, in spite of not being produced by a museum institution, as it often happens with digital strategies, but rather constituting a more survey-like overview; still fully employs the rhetoric, paradigms and jargon that expresses, in the end, a certain understanding of the online digital context. Non necessarily an incorrect one, but surely one that cannot be merely accepted and must be critiqued throughout.

I find very significant that the very first topic that the book addresses is the seemingly eternal darling of technoutopia, Web 2.0. This iteration of the Web, which has been dismissed as marketing jargon by many including one of the Internet's very founders, is presented as a sort of technologically-powered watershed: it will 'open new scenarios' in which the role of the user will change from passive consumer to producer or prosumer (p.9), progressively giving life to a culture of convergence (p.12). As is typical for this kind of texts, the fulfilment of technology's promises is largely postponed into a visible yet out of reach future.Web 2.0 itself allows, empowers and opens avenues of possibilities for a future utopia of knowledge and participation, configuring a 'state of grace' that is ripe with promises - perhaps without a need to actually deliver at the level of such expectations. The Language employed emphasises transition from a state to another: everything seems to be 'on the way to' and 'becoming' without actually being there - puzzling, since the paradigm shifts described are well underway and, sometimes, on the way out (as in the case of the prosumer, who has become an established figure and has now largely been normalised and accepted into the fold of global capital).

It is then only logical that another big chunk of text is spent on enumerating the flaws on the current state of affairs, which is a particularly easy exercise in the italian context: this due both to national disposition, and the objectively laggish situation of the museum environment at a national level. The Fondazione Fitzcarraldo's document configures the present as a dire yet not hopeless necessary stage, the situation that needs to be both remediated and re-mediated; in both cases through technology. The need for re-mediation becomes all the more urgent when comparison with the Anglo-Saxon model, seen as more advanced and integrated, are evoked (p.54). The matter that interests me, in this case, is not if such perceptions are correct or otherwise (they are), but the kind of paradigm-scape they paint: one in which, in Italy but also abstractly everywhere, a renewed and humanising technology promises to create a better, utopian tomorrow from the difficulties of today. A move between eras - from the tradigital to the connected (p.29).

Humanising tetchnology has become a key strategy of contemporary global capital, of which museums are also an expression. Web 2.0 is a paramount example of such a strategy, considering how it rhetorically positions itself as the point in which the imagination, affect and 'humanity' of the person behind the screen can finally express itself meaningfully, breaking the machinic sheen of identity-less interaction and rendering the Internet a web of people instead of machines - producing wealth all the while. This idea and its affective potential are all employed throughout the text: it is mostly conceptualised as a passage from the 'reach... to the engage' (p.24), a stage of the museum-user interaction in which the latter is affectively 'hooked' and reeled in, by employing the affect-building affordances that Web 2.0 as a technology affords: humanisation and consequent reduction of the machine-man distance; interaction and the consequent (perhaps mostly fictional) empowerment of the user; investment by the user in the museum as a brand (a concept that comes across in the Fitzcarraldo report, as well as in Tate Online's, and many other digital strategies).

Overall, "Il Museo e La Rete" offers an interesting overview, and more than a few case studies, regarding possible strategies for digital engagement; but it does so by largely rehashing paradigms that have become, by now, fairly commonplace. The end result is a strategic document that, even when accounting for its survey-like intentions, remains fairly generic and presents us with statements that, while not particularly insightful, remain slippery enough that they are never outright wrong.


- Fondazione Fitzcarraldo. Il Museo e la Rete: Nuovi Modi di Comunicare (2014).
- Stack John. "Tate Digital Strategy 2013-2015: Digital as a Dimension of Everything" Tate Papers 19 (2013).
- Anderson, Nate. "Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0:" nobody even knows what it means" ArsTechnica (2006).