Page 86 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

3 MEDIA

Exhibition design has evolved as a new discipline, as an apex of all media
and powers of communication and of collective efforts and effects.
(Herbert Bayer cited in Staniszewski 1998:3)

In a world of transnational media and global communications networks
new models of the museum are necessary, that are appropriate for an age
of networks, of decentered and diffused distribution of knowledge, and
of access and reciprocal communication.
(Charlie Gere 1997)

Materialist media theory

This chapter is about museums as media, and how recent media theory can be
used to theorize museums. In this first section, I consider what the materialist
tradition in media studies offers for an analysis of museums as media, not just
in relation to display, but also in relation to their research, archiving and
preservation aspects. In the second section, I look at developments toward
increasingly ‘mediatic’ museums. This is followed by a discussion of the develop-
ment of the interactive science centre. In the final section of the chapter, I
examine educational notions of learning through things and through experi-
ence in relation to the museum’s move away from an emphasis on ‘object
lessons’ toward an emphasis on experience.
Existing studies of museums as media tend to focus on the exhibition,
emphasizing museums’ roles as communicators of messages and visitors as the
recipients of those messages. They have made use of theories familiar within
cultural and media studies, such as semiotic approaches, viewing visitors
as active decoders of museum messages, or treating objects as ‘utterances’ –
instances of ‘speech’ organized into a ‘grammar’ through practices of collection
and display (Hooper-Greenhill 1995: 5–8; Pearce 1995). Semiotics derives from
structuralist linguistics, in which utterances are subordinate to the abstract