Page 153 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

142 • Sport, Media and Society

also been challenged for propagating a touristic view of the world as unchanging and
essentialised (Dicks 2003).

While contemporary museums may be more reflexive about their role in discur-
sively constructing knowledge about people and objects, Dicks (2003) suggested
that they are also under pressure to provide visitors with what they want. The need to
satisfy customer expectations becomes necessary as government policies push mu-
seums to embrace the logic of the marketplace. As Dicks (2003: 149) observed, this
means that they are expected to offer views of the world which do not confl ict with
those of visitors and sponsors, and visitors tend to prefer ‘clear cultural identities

on display . . . not . . . reflexivity, hybridity and fragmentation’. Consideration of how
museums negotiate these demands and represent the world enables us to elicit the
apparatus of the institution. As Emmison and Smith (2000: 121) noted, by examin-
ing exhibitions, we can ‘learn a good deal about the various discursive frameworks
which are at work, not so much in the society represented, as in the society doing the
representing’.
Contemporary museums are able to draw on a range of intersensory technologies
to construct, not simply display, experiences. Visitors expect to interact with exhibits
that deliver so-called living history with sound, smell, touch and sight. Objects are
not always placed reverently in dusty cabinets, and visitors’ engagement with dis-
plays is at odds with the ideal of the contemplative gaze. All kinds of media are part
of the new museum experience: photographs, audio-visual films on small or large

screens, audio narratives on headsets and touch-screen computer monitors as well as
more traditional panels, wall displays and glass cases. While some critics have ar-
gued that the emphasis on experience and sensation may detract from the museum’s
role in delivering knowledge and understanding, Dicks (2003) pointed to ways that
multimedia can also be used to produce rich and detailed stories.
Museums can also deliberately refuse to present clear and unambiguous inter-
pretations of the world by adopting a postmodern, aestheticised approach to display
(Dicks 2003):

Techniques of bricologe, pastiche, montage, quotation, and so forth represent a
different tendency to that of simulation. They are designed to ask questions about
the nature of representation rather than answering ones about the interpretation
of history. (p. 167)

Part of this approach is its rejection of fixed routes through the collections, giving
visitors the freedom to make their own choices about where to go and what to see.
The use of different media to deliver a range of spectacles for the visitor avoids the
delineation of one single storyline in favour of multiple perspectives. A danger of
this style of exhibition is its sound-bite version of knowledge, so that while these
strategies may appear democratic and accessible, they may ‘simply forestall engage-
ment with the exhibition’s subject matter’ (Dicks 2003: 168).