Let’s start with the “little brother” making mistakes in the museum: Two-way thinking on audience participation and museum responsibility

Let’s start with the “little brother” picking the wrong things for the museum (New Language)

Recently, museums have burst into public view in an unexpected way. On the short video platform, a 7-year-old "kid brother" complained about mistakes at the Shenzhen Museum of Natural History in Guangdong; on the bulletin board of the Yiyang City Museum in Hunan, a child found that "dagger" was mistaken for "seven"... Faced with these mistakes, each museum was sincere and responded and rectified in a timely manner. The case may not seem big, but it deserves to be discussed from many levels.

Let’s first talk about the “new needs” and “new expectations” conveyed by “Eager to Find Faults”. In recent years, the craze for cultural museums has continued to heat up. Some audiences, especially young people, are no longer satisfied with checking in and checking in, but instead enter the exhibition hall with a certain amount of knowledge reserves and problem awareness. The audience is willing to spend time looking at the display boards and asking questions because they have expectations for this cultural palace. In fact, every time an error is corrected, the audience is using their own knowledge to help the museum check a pass.

Looking at it at a deeper level, this "helping" mentality reflects the audience's unwillingness to stop at the one-way relationship of "I show and you see", and they are more eager to get involved as a participant. Especially for children, when the mistakes picked out are humbly accepted and corrected by the museum, they receive a gift more precious than knowledge: the dignity of knowledge does not lie in who tells it, but in whether it can withstand testing.

A positive interaction is formed between the "curious" audience and the frank and open museum, which not only consolidates the rigor of the exhibition content, but also effectively enhances the audience's sense of cultural participation and identity.

However, emphasizing and valuing audience feedback and participation does not mean that museums can "outsource" the responsibility for content control. We have to talk about the "carelessness" and "carelessness" behind text omissions. The errors on many exhibition boards are relatively low-level and appear frequently, which shows that some museums have problems such as lax control of details and lagging content updates. The errors caused are not all due to "careless" accidental mistakes, but more often due to "not paying attention" and the lack of responsibility. As a public cultural service institution, if a museum places more emphasis on “exhibition” than “management” and makes people laugh, it will easily undermine the professionalism and authority of the exhibition.

In response to problems such as text errors and improper expressions in individual museum exhibitions, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage recently issued a notice clarifying that museums, as the main body responsible for the review of display and exhibition content, must independently review the display and exhibition content and must not outsource it to a third party, let alone entrust or transfer the review responsibility.

In the final analysis, the audience's correction is to "fill in the gaps" for the museum. Museums should first do solid professional work, and then incorporate audience feedback into the closed loop of "correction-review-optimization". “A museum is a big school.” Today, when visiting museums and watching exhibitions has increasingly become a way of life, museums must work hard to improve the quality of content and design exciting exhibitions in order to capture more enthusiasm and expectations.

(Yinyan People's Daily)