Museums

The internet is a new technological medium that serves the purpose of communication - on its shifting sands of connectivity nationhood and identity are constituted in relation to the 'real' world and apart from it - (The Virtual/Real dichotomy is quite illusive - if one explores the question)
Museums have been a site where national identity is learned through the sites performance of history where audience members reflect on themselves in relation to a larger society and historical narrative. The Washington Post explored Second Life in a 2007 article and what they termed New Museums,

In the age of the networked computer, museums are being fundamentally challenged in the same ways that other bastions of education and entertainment -- from libraries to the music industry -- are being rocked to their cores.

The arguments swirl. Are museums in the bone-and-pigment business, reliquaries of the past? Are they in the theater business, telling stories through sensational lighting, presentations like stage sets and costumed interpretive actors? Are museums in the experience business, forced to reach for ever fancier gizmos and blockbusters to compete with the sports world and Disney for family time and money?


Museums are sites - are online - are battelfields - their definition is elusive - as the Washington Post article points out they are heavily linked to the idea that they are portraying some vision of "truth"
Museum Fatigue 12 up, 3 down love ithate it


The type of exhaustion you get from walking from place to place, stopping, thinking about what you are seeing, then continuing. This happens often in a museum.
Too bad this place has no benches, I’m feeling the museum fatigue.


--------------What happens when We See Too Many Museums ---Too many Truths ---Do we hold on to a nostalgic notion of past - reinvigorate the Truth of Before to Create a Truth For Now-----
Anderson’s study on nationalism teaches the reader that nationhood is created through the creation of an imagined community, or the nation.>Anderson writes, “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (1991, p. 5).This is possible through the construction of a narrative of historical past.As Stucal (2003) notes in The Bounded Field, “the construction of community’ takes place in national museums because they present a national history as a focus of identification” (p. 134)">Culture is created through sites such as museums, “where a public learns to look but not touch, if they are sites where a public learns to be bourgeois, they are also places where caretakers come to assume an inevitable specific ways of governing or managing a public” (Gables 2006, p. 115 Historical images displayed to viewers, “allow social actors to locate themselves within the frame of their place of origin”(Stuckle 2003, p. 109).
In response to Museum Fatigue - The Museum viewer is increasingly targeted as creator of the museum - active participant - the ways that post-museums navigate/guide the user through their narrative Truths - is defined as post-museum strategies in a recent article from CCS- through making their logic appear natural they embody a Deuleuze & Guattarian