Cecilia Lazzeretti, you published your paper “We hope you share your thoughts with us: the illusion of engagement in museum blogging”. What was your starting point for your research?
I was interested in the tension existing between transparency/openness and discursive foreclosure/gatekeeping, which is complex for museums to manage. This is particularly evident in blogs, which are mostly written by insiders/staff members and therefore communicate a calculated view of knowledge. Moreover, although there is an intention to give the audience a voice, interaction between the author and reader is often avoided by disabling comments.
You examined the famous J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) blogs. Why exactly did you look at these two blogs?
These institutions were chosen due to their international relevance and expertise in the field of museum communication, but also for their different blogging protocols: a partially moderated policy is used by the V&A blog and a fully moderated policy is implemented in the Getty blog.
Both museums designed their blogs to communicate knowledge in a more transparent way. Do you think they mastered the challenge?
Quantitatively speaking, comments in the Getty blog are numerous, although almost 50% of them remain unanswered. More significantly, when dialogues occur between the author of the post and the blog reader, there is always a mutual enrichment. One limit, if any, is that dialogues often take place between museum professionals and their peers, rather than involving the general audience.
The V&A blog is characterized by a limited number of comments and the amount of interaction is also low. On average, approximately only 25% of comments are answered. Disabling comments does not always negatively affect the dialogue, which can also arise from the exchange between users, regardless of the absence of the museum’s voice in the threads, but leaves users disoriented and discourages their participation. The lack of moderation, especially on comments comprising open questions or from more sensitive members of the general public, creates a sense of indifference rather than openness.
How should museums adequately capitalize on dialogues which would be expected as they are part of social media?
The issue of trust is at the heart of this discussion. Scholars have demonstrated that shared authority is more effective at creating and guiding culture than institutional control. Institutions should therefore place deeper levels of trust in their online users and combine the communication of knowledge with audience engagement. However, creating a sense of trust is problematic for museums as it challenges their traditional view of authority and authenticity.
You found differences though between the two museums in their level of moderation of their blogs. How important are moderated blog entries?
Having a clearly defined blog moderation policy and scrupulously applying it is key to ethical interactions. Users need to feel moderators attentively and actively listen to their voice. Ideally, how responses are constructed should not depend on the source of the comments (who wrote them) or on the quality of the comments (how they are written).
Did you identify linguistic evidence of openness or foreclosure?
In the case of the Getty blog, discursive strategies are put in place which create a sense of closeness with the reader and openness to the contributions of external users, but a policy of strict control is applied on the blog contents and on the quality of comments.
Conversely, the V&A staff has a more informal approach to blogging and has embraced the ‘do not delete anything’ rule, suggesting a sense of openness to the contributions of users; yet they openly admit to obscuring and interrupting comments and give evidence of this by using the “comments are closed” function at the end of some threads.
What are the outcomes of your analysis?
The analysis suggests that while managing and moderating a blog, the approach adopted by the museum can never be one of indifference. Any form of interaction by the public, whether for or against the museum, should be noticed and acknowledged, albeit in the form of a simple word of thank you. However time-consuming this may be to professionals, taking an active part is essential to maintaining an authentically collaborative function of the blog.
Picture: private
(vic)