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Last week the NY state government repealed a temporary law preventing museums from deaccessioning collections in order to cover operating expenses.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?

Pew Millenial Study -- They are not Generation X

The Pew Research Center recently made public their study on Millennials. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1501/millennials-new-survey-generational-personality-upbeat-open-new-ideas-technology-bound (scroll to end of web page for link to entire report).

I have only had a chance to read the executive summary. Reading those pages, however, reminded me that the generation that grew up with computers, internet, cell phones, social media, etc are now in their 20s. The first plugged in generation is now in the job market, forming families, bringing their own children to museums, looking for ways to remain connected in a post-college community or forming connections in a new community. And that the children now coming to museums are actually the second "plugged in" generation. The expectations and needs of these visitors, and how these visitors value museums, has been addressed by museum colleagues for years -- notably (to me) Nancy Proctor at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Victoria Portway at the National Air and Space Museum, Kate Haley Goldman at the Institute for Learning Innovation, and Nina Simon of the blog (and articles, lectures, etc) Museum 2.0. These colleagues have been at the forefront of understanding technologically based social engagement in/including museums. I am grateful to be able to linger on the edge of their discussions and experiments.

For more information about the Report, the following is from the Report Introduction:

"This report represents the Pew Research Center’s most ambitious examination to date of America's newest generation, the Millennials, many of whom have now crossed into adulthood. We began looking at this age group in 2006 in a comprehensive survey we conducted in association with the PBS documentary series, “Generation Next.” Our new report greatly expands on that seminal work. In the pages that follow we set out to compare the values, attitudes and behaviors of Millennials with those of today’s older adults. And to the extent that we can, we also compare them with older adults back when they were the age that Millennials are now."

John Brown was obviously a maniac...or a martyr...or a counter-terrorist.

Ordinary people doing ordinary things; ordinary people doing extraordinary things; extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. All in the same time and place.

Was this an intentional theme of the interpretive tour at Harper's Ferry this past Saturday? Not sure. With-in this structure, however, there was room for context to tell a story of the mid-nineteenth century town of Harper's Ferry in which John Brown, the person and the idea, acting in ways that are both mystifying and understandable, steps in. This structure permitted space to include the socioeconomic workings of the town, the sheer confusion of the raid, the hanging of John Brown, and the the myriad of interpretations placed on Harper's Ferry since. And it allowed for the interpretation to be open ended - was John Brown right, wrong, neither, both? What about the actions of the whites? The free-blacks? The enslaved? History is an argument, a discussion. The interpretation at Harper’s Ferry reminded me how tantalizing those arguments can be.

Last Note: Special thanks to David Larsen, Training Manager for Interpretation & Education at Harper's Ferry National Park for the Saturday tour. I may not have talked, but I was completely engaged.

Constructed Situation or Conceptual Bullshit?

My first visit to the Guggenheim Museum occurred two Sunday’s ago. I stepped into the rotunda. I looked around, consulted the map in my hand, and started up the ramp. A child of 10 approached me to ask questions about an exhibit. Pre-visit survey, I thought? Wanting to support what struck me as the world’s youngest data collector I obliged.

“Where is the exhibit?”, I asked.
“I am the exhibit.”, said he.

He asked me what I thought of the word “progress.” As we talked we walked up the ramp. A second person took over. Ah, I thought, now I will get a debrief and be on my way.

No.

This next person took over and we talked more, going higher up the ramp. This wasn’t data collection. This was some sort of program I was involved in. Half way up a third person took me up and my former conversation partner disappeared. And a quarter way from the top a fourth person picked up the conversation. The transitions from one conversation to the next were not smooth. I went from talking about value in museums with person #2 to memory with person #3 to environmentalism with person #4. By person #3 I was weary of this activity but thought to go forward, thinking this person must be the last. I ask visitors all the time to participate in activities, it seemed hypocritical to break my own participation. But by person #4 I had had quite enough. I stopped person #4 and with some annoyance I asked “When will this activity be over so I can go back to my museum experience?” She pointed out the top of the ramp not 50 feet away. During the course of all these conversations I had wound my way to the top of the ramp but all the way I had thought, “This is not how I had planned to wind my way up the ramp...I wanted to stop and look down into the rotunda.” When we reached the top person #4 shook my hand, said thank you, and disappeared.

I waited.

There was no debrief, no project description, no additional people, absolutely nothing and noone to explain to me what exactly I had just participated in. What was that?

That was a constructed situation by artist Tino Sehgal. Sehgal “...seeks to produce meaning and value through a transformation of actions rather than solid materials...A visitor is no longer a passive spectator, but one who bears a responsibility in shaping and even contributing to the actual realization of the piece...it underscores an individual’s own agency in the museum environment.”

As I stood slightly fuming -- where were the labels, the debrief, the something so I can make sense of what I just participated in -- my husband, not without some glee, asked: “Did you hear yourself ask ‘When will this be done so I can go back to my museum experience?” Slowly my husband pointed out to me that the constructed situation was my museum experience. It had not fit in with my image of my visit to the Guggenheim and by asking the question I had not-so-subtly declared the activity as a periphery experience.

And he was absolutely correct. The constructed situation was as much a part of my museum experience as if I had just walked up the ramp. And unlike any other artwork that I would see in the museum that day, my participation in Sehgal's piece was absolutely necessary for the work to actually exist.

This was a truly participatory experience in a museum. It was odd. It was confusing. It was exhilarating.



Last note: The title of this entry was a comment I overheard between two women at the top of the ramp. They had just participated in a constructed situation.

The Blogging Experiment Begins Again

My last experiment with blogging lasted approximately 3 posts. This time I am aiming for 4.

Coming Soon

Oberg Research's blog is coming soon!