{"id":30,"date":"2026-06-28T21:48:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/?p=30"},"modified":"2026-06-28T21:48:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:48:50","slug":"hyperlinked-environments-cool-people-go-to-museums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/2026\/06\/28\/hyperlinked-environments-cool-people-go-to-museums\/","title":{"rendered":"Hyperlinked Environments: Cool People Go to Museums"},"content":{"rendered":"

Visiting museums is one of my favorite pastimes, especially when I travel. It\u2019s been fascinating to witness the evolution of technology integration in museums during my twenty-ish years of consciousness. I was privileged to grow up near the <\/span>Discovery Cube<\/span><\/a> in Santa Ana, which demonstrated to me early on the effectiveness of learning through interaction. I first visited <\/span>The Broad<\/span><\/a> in Los Angeles in high school and marveled at the starkly different experience a modern art museum could offer versus a traditional one. The Broad encouraged absorbing art through more than just the visual sense and making your own interpretation of the art. Additionally, I\u2019ve watched art museums evolve from renting out MP3 players as audio guides, to advertising their app or a QR code to their website for patrons to access audio guides on their own devices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My most recent immersive museum experience was the <\/span>teamLAB Borderless museum<\/span><\/a> in Tokyo, Japan. We were instructed to take our shoes and socks off and leave them in lockers prior to entering the museum. You move through the exhibits linearly. They included a room made of black, parachute-like fabric, a mirrored room with fake flowers that moved up and down based on your movement, and a knee-tall pool with projections of interactive koi fish on the surface. People had their phones out recording the experience the whole time. The videos I have are too large to attach, so here<\/a> is a link to a Google Drive folder. It was certainly a unique experience, but I found it sensorily overwhelming as an autist. Still, I\u2019m glad I went.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A scuffed selfie of me in a teamLAB exhibit filled with LEDs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve been delighted to see some museums build a strong presence on social media in recent years. Whether it\u2019s frequent posts of their exhibits or funny videos of senior docents reading a script written by Gen Z interns,<\/a> more and more, museums are making their mark on social media. It\u2019s proven to be an effective strategy to draw in visitors for such popular museums as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Broad, and even The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Daily Bruin Staff, 2016; Titlow, 2016). I believe that museums that embrace technology will survive our brutal attention economy while ones that reject it will eventually crumble due to lack of relevance, attendance, and funding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the late 2010s, I\u2019ve seen plenty of my friends on Instagram post profound photos of themselves looking at art, and I\u2019ve done the same. To me, these types of posts have always projected a message of \u201cI\u2019m cool and intellectual\u201d, and this belief is even backed up by psychological studies of the artistic personality (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2007). Even if it\u2019s performative, I do think this Millennial\/Gen Z association of museums with good taste has and will continue to contribute towards museum attendance. Ultimately, social media is all about curating your image, for both patrons and museums.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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An example of a “profound” museum photo from my Instagram. Taken at the Palm Springs Art Museum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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A more fun museum selfie from my mom and I at the Hilbert Museum in Orange, CA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While museum curators have mixed feelings about sharing images of their collections online, I share The Met\u2019s perspective that increasing accessibility is an ultimate good (Charr, 2020). After all, the mission of museums is to share knowledge and creativity (Charr, 2020). Personally I\u2019ve always perceived a distinction between seeing an image of a piece online and seeing it in person. In person, you\u2019re able to appreciate the dimensions and texture of the piece. It\u2019s an <\/span>experience<\/span><\/i> rather than a still image to swipe through. I imagine that most people feel the same as me, but I don\u2019t have any evidence to back up that belief.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish I knew about The Met\u2019s mobile-friendly website and app before visiting back in 2018. I personally found The Met quite overwhelming and not enjoyable. Since that experience, when visiting a large museum I check their website first and find a few pieces I really want to see so that I have a focus. Before visiting a modern or smaller museum, I check their website to see what exhibits are currently on display to see if I\u2019m interested in them. I see now that the increased accessibility of museums has had a positive impact on my museum-going experience.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Based on all these revelations, I believe that the growing integration of technology with museums is a positive change. People, especially younger generations, want to have experiences. The more curators are able to convince the public that museums are an experience rather than a warehouse for irrelevant artifacts, the better their chances of survival.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/b><\/p>\n

Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Furnham, A., Reimers, S. (2007, February 4). Personality and art. The British Psychological Society. <\/span>https:\/\/www.bps.org.uk\/psychologist\/personality-and-art<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Charr, M. (2020, June 17). How technology is bringing museums back to life. <\/span>MuseumNext. <\/span><\/i>https:\/\/www.museumnext.com\/article\/how-technology-is-bringing-museums-back-to-life\/<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Daily Bruin Staff. (2016, January 20). The impact of social media, art. <\/span>Daily Bruin.<\/span><\/i> https:\/\/dailybruin.com\/2016\/01\/20\/the-impact-of-social-media-on-museums-art<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Titlow, J. P. (2016, February 29). How a 145-year-old art museum stays relevant in the smartphone age. <\/span>Fast Company. <\/span><\/i>https:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/3057236\/how-a-145-year-old-art-museum-stays-relevant-in-the-smartphone-age<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting museums is one of my favorite pastimes, especially when I travel. It\u2019s been fascinating to witness the evolution of technology integration in museums during my twenty-ish years of consciousness. I was privileged to grow up near the Discovery Cube in Santa Ana, which demonstrated to me early on the effectiveness of learning through interaction. … Continue reading Hyperlinked Environments: Cool People Go to Museums<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":835,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/835"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/isthebel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}