Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next

Settling in to new offices and a month of travel tends to derail many things...like blogging. Happy fall. - Caren S Oberg

The Pew Research Center published an evidence based analysis of the Millennial generation in February 2010: Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next.

How will your museum use this report? Will your museum consider Chapter 8: Politics, Ideology, and Civic Engagement to inform programming? Will you carefully read Chapter 4: Technology and Social Media to when a decision is made to inaugurate cell-phone tours in order to “reach young people”? Perhaps you will just find yourself returning to Chapter 1: Overview and rereading the optimistic paragraph:

“Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials - the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium – have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”

We know the feeling, Kermit. We really do.

The title and the link both from Heidi Kartchner, Oberg Research staff member extraordinaire:

www.hulu.com/watch/38858/sesame-street-muppet-news-flash-angry-reporter

Trust Museums? - Part 1

Last week the NY state government repealed a temporary law preventing museums from deaccessioning collections in order to cover operating expenses. This issue struck a rather raw and apparently vocal nerve in me (see AAM’s face book status about this issue). Partially I was incensed by the involvement of the government of NY deciding on a museum best practice in the name of the museum and the public trust. Yet if museums are funded by the state it should not be a surprise that the state feels it has a say in museum practice.

Rather it was the underlying distrust of museums to make responsible decisions. Between NY State enacting the temporary law in the first place and the Facebook commentary and AAM’s response after repealing the law, I assumed they expected that galleries would suddenly become empty halls as staff rushed to deaccession their objects and give themselves raises.

If we trust museums to care for, display, and research our cultural heritage then why do we not trust them to deaccession thoughtfully.

Challenge me with a counter-narrative

When we think about it, what makes our intellectual engagement with object or subjects at museums not just memorable, but transformative? It is not just new information about an object. It is being asked and allowed to challenge our long-held assumptions, whether personal or communal. It is the result of this challenge that leads us to see the world in a fundamentally different way. It is engaging with the counter-narrative.

Professor Steve Horwitz discuses the importance of the counter-narrative in his article “The Importance of History.” Dr. Horwitz’s emphasizes the importance for classical liberals to present counter-narratives to traditional economic history with the task of challenging what students know about history and what they believe they know about history (italics added). He further explains that challenging students to consider their knowledge of history is important because such narratives color our response to present-day concerns.

Such challenges exist in museums but they tend to be few. More often than not museums believe that to present counter-narratives is too risky. Museums need our support to minimize such risk. Private funders should be rewarded for supporting counter-narratives. Publicly supported institutions should be rewarded for intellectually challenging the public they are said to be educating. Such statements are simplistic, ignoring the fact that transformations are difficult, even painful. We can start at the beginning, as Dr. Horwitz does -- facilitate more and more experiences that challenge visitors to consider what they know and what they believe they know about history.

Your library and organizing your thoughts

Book A and Book B have always been next to each other in my library. Until I moved.

Now Book A is just that bit to tall to fit on the shelf unit next to Book B. I cannot put them together. As I thought through why I have Book A and why it had always rested next to Book B I began to consider how the my library layout reflects how I think about these topics in my head and in my work. It occurred to me that Book B and Book W go together far better than Book B and Book A. Once placed together I found they gave me a hint towards solving a project issue with which I had been struggling (and was the reason I had abandoned the computer for the moving boxes).

I am fascinated by the mental image of my brain subtly rewiring itself as I change the positions of the books on the shelves.

Welcome - now please leave.

The tourists have returned to Washington. They talk too loudly on the metro; they stand on the wrong side of the escalators; they insist that the Capitol building is the White House.

And for some of us they are our life blood.

They fill in our surveys and answer our questions; they explain why they came; and what they hope to experience. They make up a majority of our annual audiences but are a special audience all their own.

So I say welcome back. Enjoy your stay.

Please forgive us for rejoicing at season’s end.

Please do not ask me to be in your shoes.

I read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland as part of a senior-year anthropology class. To start a discussion of the book my professor asked, “What would you have done in this situation? What would you have done if you were a Polish villager ordered to massacre your neighbors?"

In asking the question do we search for some type of truth in people? There must be a reason ordinary people became murderers -- social pressure, the universal need to protect one’s own life and family first. Something, anything. And if we can empathize - if we can put ourselves in their place -- then do we not learn something about ourselves in the process?

But what if faced with a situation in which putting oneself in the other's shoes is an impossibility. I remember the taste of bile when I considered the absurdity of the question. “I cannot in any way answer this question." I began to say."I am Jewish. I would never, ever, EVER have been on the other side of that gun. Nothing in my 22 years of life has told me anything but that absolute fact.”

In an effort to make history relevant we ask visitors to “put yourself in the shoes of....” The best interpretations allow us to consider what we would do in a specific situation by giving us a set of context in which to consider our decision. But what if all of the context in the world does not change some absolute truths? In demanding that a person empathize are we actually marginalizing their own truths?