17 examples of museum-ish social media for Alexandra Korey

Alexandra - -  here are some thoughts re: your question about examples of museum social media. (Posted here for easier sharing/linking and in case someone else was interested.)

Not a comprehensive list and not exclusively 2016, but perhaps useful/provocative. Note that I’m mostly interested in (and focusing on) examples that come from outside museums themselves.

1. Re: participation at scale, across the whole sector - - #askacurator, @museumselfieday, #ilovemuseums - - via @mardixon (and see museumselfie info/paper here by Alli Burness http://museumselfies.tumblr.com/)

2. Re: giving control of the brand/trust relationship to users. @sweden - - http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-pleasing-irreverence-of-sweden

3. Re: Civics/Governance in public institutions (demonstrating what is possible), “The Spanish Town That Runs On Twitter” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/technology/the-spanish-town-that-runs-on-twitter.html

4. Re: opening up to public interest in science, process, inquiry - - How to Tweet Like a Robot on Mars - - http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/how-to-tweet-like-a-robot-on-mars/381114/

5. Re: the relationship between global/local and not taking oneself too seriously, Orkney Library - - https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/real-talk-who-doesnt-dress-as-whitesnake-once-a-week [Note: Tumblr thinks the link is spam or evil, but it’s not, and it’s a good article. Copy/paste the URL into your browser.]

6. Re: cross-sector movement by museum staff - - #museumsRespondToFerguson. https://twitter.com/hashtag/museumsrespondtoFerguson?src=hash

7. Re: unusual and engaging telling of history - - @ReliveApollo11, real-time tweeting of ground/mission communication transcripts from original Apollo moon mission, from National Air and Space Museum (and in particular the numerous and poignant replies from the public)

8. Re: beautiful and surprising concepts, though not *exactly* social media, “Birdwatching” at the Rijksmuseum - - a meetup of birdwatching enthusiasts to tag/catalog images of birds in the Rijks collections. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/vogelen and http://www.wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/research/wude/digital-birdwatching-at-the-rijksmuseum/

9. Re: working with communities - - the beautiful way that Dr Meghan Ferriter supports and encourages the Smithsonian Transcription Center community.

10. Re: museum collections speaking for themselves: Museum Bots - - https://twitter.com/backspace/lists/museum-bots/members

11. Re: initiatives supported by users/fans on their own - - #bookstagram on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/bookstagram/?hl=en and http://bookriot.com/2013/06/07/a-brief-guide-to-bookstagram/

12. And Instagram in general…

13. And YouTube in general…

14: Re: Collecting/curating *outside* of official channels. Pinterest - - https://www.pinterest.com/search/?q=museum&referrer=sitelinks_searchbox

15. Re: soliciting stories/content from the public, The Museum of Broken Relationships. https://brokenships.com/

16. Re: artists speaking for themselves - - @aiww - - the artist on Twitter. “Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.” (A little more on http://usingdata.tumblr.com/post/88281521008/twitter-is-the-peoples-tool-the-tool-of-the)

17. …And an enormous shoutout/kudos to all the museums out there who are just being good - - good to their audiences and communities - - on social media. It’s not a sexy story, but it’s a great one, and maybe the one that matters the most. 

Failure, with great precision

“This measurement ruled out our whole inflation-based story with 99.999…% confidence, where there are a hundred million trillion trillion trillion nines after the decimal point. Not good.”

— Physicist Max Tegmark, on learning that data from the COBE satellite contradicted his theory about space/time inflation. From Our Mathematical Universe. http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html

“Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to you.”

— Various and paraphrased, via Time Travel by James Gleick

Best pizza in the block

Everything you need to know about global vs. local scale, in one image. (Dave Berg, Mad Magazine, 1956)

TEDx Tysons

My talk about the UN Live Museum for Humanity at TEDxTysons.

The Hubble volume

“The Hubble volume is the sphere of space visible to the Hubble telescope—i.e. everything that’s not receding from us at a rate greater than the speed of light due to the expansion of the universe. The Hubble volume is an unfathomably large 10³¹ cubic light years.”

— That’s 846,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic kilometers.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

The old system is dead

“We are a new generation of artists, makers, supporters, and consumers who believe that the old system through which we exchanged content and money is dead. Not dying: dead.”

— Amanda Palmer, introduction to Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free 

"He doesn't win because he's a better fighter…"

“He doesn’t win because he’s a better fighter. He wins because he doesn’t give up.” At 7:30, from the marvelous Every Frame a Painting

“When you’ve had a monopoly for a hundred years and you’ve never seen change, change may seem like death to you.”

— Lydon Rive, co-founder and ceo of SolarcCity, commenting on the fossil-fuel power industry, Financial Times online / “US energy: Off the grid” January 13, 2015 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b411852e-9b05-11e4-882d-00144feabdc0.html (paywall)

“The new planet we live on is inherently more expensive than the old one. The wind blows harder; more rain falls; the sea rises. It would cost more to settle it if we were just arriving from outer space…”

— Bill McKibben, Eaarth. http://www.powells.com/book/eaarth-making-a-life-on-a-tough-new-planet-9780805090567/2-14

McKibben continues: "“…but the price tag comes because we built it up so thoroughly during our ten thousand years and now must defend the investment.”

To share a common life

“Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. … For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”

— Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, as quoted by Tom Friedman in This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/friedman-this-column-is-not-sponsored-by-anyone.html?_r=0

What do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem?

“…Too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re trained for. The issue here is something rarely considered at school: what do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong question in the first place? This happens frequently in design work in practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply problem solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original question. you simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set; you can’t challenge its premise.”

— Dan Hill, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, a Strategic Design Vocabulary http://www.strelka.com/en/press/books/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses-a-strategic-design-vocabulary

“When something goes wrong, it can usually be traced back to the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises.”

— Norman Potter, What is a Designer, 1969, as quoted in Dan Hill’s Dark Matter and Trojan Horses

"How is that possible?"

“The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that have still to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in the other documents. The question is how that is possible…”

— Richard Fenyman, The Distinction of Past and Future, 1964. http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/feynman/past_and_future.html

The whole passage: "Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘These are the conditions, now what happens next?’ But all our sister sciences have a completely different problem: in fact all the other things that are studied — history, geology, astronomical history — have a problem of this other kind. I find they are able to make predictions of a completely different type from those of a physicist. A physicist says, 'In this condition I’ll tell you what will happen next’. But a geologist will say something like this — 'I have dug in the ground and I have found certain kinds of bones. I predict that if you dig in the ground you will find a similar kind of bones’. The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that have still to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in the other documents. The question is how that is possible…"

“They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old”

— Neil Gaiman, on the librarians in the community library where he grew up. Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming. The Guardian, 2013

“Life generates energy from microscopic electrical motors that are embedded in cell membranes and run off electrical currents driven by pH gradients across the membranes. It is impossible for words to do justice to these amazing molecular machines.”

— Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction by David C. Catling, Oxford University Press, 2013

“I heard an interview with the renowned evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson in which he addressed why, as a senior professor—and one of the most famous biologists in the world—he continued to teach non-majors biology at Harvard. Wilson explained that non-majors biology is the most important science class that one could teach. He felt many of the future leaders of this nation would take the class, and that this was the last chance to convey to them an appreciation for biology and science.”

— Defending Darwin by James Krupa, February 2015
https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

"People never stopped coming back"

“Facebook has tested the loyalty and patience of Android users by secretly introducing artificial errors that would automatically crash the app for hours at a time, says one person familiar with the one-time experiment. The purpose of the test, which happened several years ago, was to see at what threshold would a person ditch the Facebook app altogether. The company wasn’t able to reach the threshold. ‘People never stopped coming back.’”

— Facebook’s Android Contingency by Amir Efrati, January 4, 2016 https://www.theinformation.com/facebooks-android-contingency-planning

Millions called

“Dial-a-Poem began in 1968 when New York artist, actor, poet John Giorno linked up 15 connected telephones to reel-to-reel tape players and made it possible for anyone to call a telephone number and listen to a poem recited by an established, often radical, poet or author…Millions called.”

— Dial-A-Poem Poets: Radicalizing space with the telephone by James Barrette https://medium.com/@JimBarrett/dial-a-poem-poets-radicalizing-space-with-the-telephone-bfb50cd8f36c#.rk9wob8su