Museums for the New Millennium:Museums for the New Millennium:The following is an edited transcript of the proceedings of "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.
MR. KURIN: Good morning. My name is Richard Kurin. I am director of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies and also chair of the 150th Anniversary Committee. Welcome to the Museums for the New Millennium symposium, exploring the future of the museum world, held on the occasion of the Smithsonian's 150th anniversary.
Last night, Dennis O'Connor, Provost of the Smithsonian, asked us to compare the old with the new. Steven Newsome, Director of the Anacostia Museum, and Rick West, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, whet our appetite with descriptions of their museums - offering new voices, new funding arrangements, and new social contracts. Yet, new might not be better to believers in the traditional, authoritative, unchanging museum. And still others, like James Boon, bemoaned the museum's basic structure. He delivered a paper in this room just a few years ago entitled "Why Museums Make Me Sad."
Most of us, I suspect, are anxious enough about the present but we need to consider our future because such can help in charting strategies, goals and directions. Our discussion should be frank and forthright, challenging and provocative, polite but not too polite, so that good ideas can emerge - "musical" ideas that can apply to a few, some, or many of us.
The Smithsonian started to explore the future of museums in the new millennium a few years ago when its regents, the ruling body, commissioned a study of the future. A former regent and the current Smithsonian Secretary, Michael Heyman, walked into that future in 1994. He waded into social contentiousness over museum exhibits in the form of the Enola Gay exhibit script. He found an address for the electronic Smithsonian on the Internet. He boldly ran the largest traveling exhibit out of Washington and around the country and has sought to invent new ways of funding museums, some very old, others not yet born. Secretary Heyman came to the Smithsonian after a long career at the University of California at Berkeley where he served as chancellor, vice chancellor, and professor of law.
A specialist in environmental law, civil rights, regional and urban planning, Michael Heyman served as counselor to the Secretary of the Interior and early in his career as the chief law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. His own social policy savvy is enhanced and tempered by the arts and sciences in the person of his wife Therese, senior curator of art (on leave) at the Oakland Museum and his son James, a physicist.
It is my pleasure to introduce the Secretary of the Smithsonian, I. Michael Heyman.
[APPLAUSE]
MR. HEYMAN: Good morning. Let me give you my welcome to one of the major programs that is part of the 150th celebration, amidst all kinds of other things. As you know, the America's Smithsonian show is the exhibition traveling around the country to which Richard alluded. We had a huge birthday party here on the mall, which [Richard] ran. We had over 600,000 people on the mall in two days of that party. Thank God it only comes every 150 years!
When I decided to accept this job two years ago, and it really was just two years ago, I saw it as a serene capstone of a career in teaching and academic administration. That shows you my lack of experience in the world of museums, even though I had five of them at the University of California. As indicated, my wife was curator at the Oakland Museum for 30 years so I was affiliated in a more immediate way. And I had a relatively brief time of service as a regent of the Smithsonian. During that time I didn't realize how little we [the Regents] were being told, because I arrived at the Smithsonian after a glorious six weeks of vacation in California and found myself, and us,
| Embroiled in the Enola Gay, and thus immersed in a very modern media blitz of which I had very little notions, knowledge or sense of how to handle.
Castigated by the Latino community for the failure of the Smithsonian to be more inclusive of Hispanic concerns and materials and people. |
Faced with a new Congress, new committee chairs in appropriations and subcommittees and a whole new structure of leadership in the Congress. |
Immersed in an era of deficit reduction where there had floated to the surface a felt need, really shared by both parties, to reduce the budget deficit with everybody fully understanding that that had to come out of domestic programs and not out of defense or benefits. |
And thus, faced with serious budgetary problems, especially as it affected some very major programs that were beginning to crystallize towards completion. Perhaps the biggest of those is the National Museum of the American Indian. It has been a constant struggle in the last two years to kind of keep that museum on track over a reluctant House of Representatives. We keep being saved to some extent by the Senate, and how long that will continue, one only can guess.
| |
In the course of my first year of service in this job, I began to understand a number of things:
The first was that the Institution had to rehaul a really archaic management and financial information system which really is not a 1980s system - it's about a 1920s system. Trying to do something with that is extraordinarily important. And then to take another shot at straightforwardly trying to rationalize the relationships between the center of the administration at the Smithsonian and each of the museums and research institutes and trying to get firmer expectations of who does what, rather than the extraordinary ambiguity that has preceded it.
Secondly, figuring out how the institution could focus in a much more organized way on bringing our collections and programs to folks elsewhere, not waiting for them to come to Washington. This means being able to do both exhibitions elsewhere and having a much greater presence on the Internet than we previously had. It means starting to explore affiliations with museums around the country to see whether or not, and under what kinds of circumstances, we could make long-term loans of materials that could be exhibited elsewhere, that could enhance other museums, and that could get us out, in that sense, from Washington. All of which, as we could all understand, is a tough undertaking and slowly occurs, but I think is really necessary.
We have to cope with the notion of how to deal with the competition out there. The competition has increased enormously with respect to the kinds of attractions created by the private sector that, in my guess, are drawing people away from coming to Washington. There are other destinations that are more attractive. Those could be Disneylands, they could be a whole variety of other kinds of "lands" that are increasingly occurring in the United States.
Fourth, there must be an understanding that the Smithsonian has simply got to raise more non-Federal money. We can't go along with 70 percent of our budget from appropriated funds. We simply have to enhance our private, non-governmental funds. This means a reliance on marketing as well as on philanthropy. I gave a speech that maybe one or two of you heard up in New York in which I was exploring what's happened in terms of corporate support of museums, as well as other kinds of institutions akin to museums. It is clear that we are shifting from the foundation part of the corporation to the marketing part of the corporation. A lot of traffic goes in that direction and a lot of changes occur when that happens. The changes that occur are considerable if one is going to include some kinds of advertising by our sponsors and other forms of much more direct appreciation for the support than was necessary when it was entirely philanthropic. It rubs a grain that is inconsistent with acceptance of that change. How to deal with enhancing the flow of support, and yet, on the other hand, not to sell one's soul, is not easy.
The necessity, the realization which I had before but it became much more direct, of how important it was that the institution continue to work hard on inclusion. This changed some, given the affirmative action backlash that's occurred in the United States. Coping with those two needs, the need, in my view, to continue to be more broadly inclusive, and the need to cope somehow with the counterforces in this society that have become much more blatant, I begin to understand, how much we're involved with this.
Clearly the Enola Gay brought dramatically to my attention, and to the attention of all in the Institution, that we really had to find ways to present controversy and controversial topics in a way that was more politically defensible. The level of our naivete has been considerable in my view. I think that there are ways to do this, but they take a lot of conversation and a lot of agreement internally so that people aren't discourageed with respect to those kinds of inquiries. Curators still feel that they can go in that direction but, on the other hand, we don't blow ourselves out of the water, which is not a trivial concern.
And finally, that we have to deal in a very straightforward way, rather than just implicitly, with the obstacles that traditional behavior in the Institution pose to making the changes necessary to cope with the circumstances I just indicated. In other words, we all fondly discussed terms of changing the culture of an institution, but certainly doing something with respect to change is necessary.
These kind of challenges that I mention are really daunting, but museums are not alone in coping with these. I just got finished serving on a commission of the association of governing boards of colleges and universities in which we spent about a year and a half studying and discussing the kinds of problems that universities and colleges are facing in this new millennium. They are considerable and they echo the kinds of things that you will be talking about and that I have noted. I might say that one of the things that is a great threat for universities, especially public universities, is boards of trustees, regents and the like who are becoming more and more politicized and thus creating enormous difficulties in managing the institutions. Luckily, I don't think museums have that problem. Certainly at the Smithsonian we don't have that problem - if we did, I think our task would be magnified enormously.
The challenges that I speak about and others that I have not noted but will be noted are obviously the grist for the mill for this symposium. I look forward to its products. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE] Return to Proceedings page
MR. KURIN: By the year 2025, I expect the youngest of us will be retired -- or beyond. Will our children or their children or grandchildren flock to museums? Or will we have to cajole them to go for the sake of their nostalgic ancestor? Will museums primarily even be places like buildings? Will museums be built to hold what is lasting? Will they themselves last? What are the things, programs and functions of the museums? Futures analysis has grown with the classic studies by the Toffler's, Nesbitt and others and is now increasingly regarded as part of standard planning practice.
Joe Coates and Jennifer Jarratt have been analyzing the future for scores of organizations and companies, examining internal assumptions and external trends and context that will shape future organizational behavior. Jennifer Jarratt is vice president of Coates & Jarratt. She is the author of Managing Your Future as an Association, The Future at Work, and Why Issues Emerge, among others. She has served on the faculty at the University of Maryland, the University of Houston, is active in professional societies and, as a journalist in a previous life, shared in a Pulitzer prize.
It's my pleasure to welcome Jennifer Jarratt, who will speak on anticipating change, the world in 2025 and its impact on museums. Jennifer.
The following is an edited transcript of the proceedings of "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.
MS. JARRATT: Good morning, everyone, if it is a good morning. I hope so. We aren't going to know down here what's happening with the world -- well, maybe somebody will bring us bulletins.
I really appreciate the invitation to talk to you this morning. I have to confess, I'm a little bit intimidated because you represent, to me anyway, a formidable body of knowledge and expertise that I highly respect. However, I'll try and get over my intimidation to tell you some things that will perhaps interest you and perhaps also annoy you. Please feel free to disagree with anything at all that I say. Certainly, thinking about the future is not at all an exact science, and a lot of what I have to say is pure speculation.
So I'm here to tell you about the world in 2025. I'd like to talk to you about some broad trends and forces that are shaping change in the world, and to tell you why that change is important to you as professionals and to your museums. I'm going to need your cooperation in this. I want you to be thinking about how this view of 2025 could influence what you do next week and what museums might be, as Richard said, to people in 2025. Before I get going, though, I think I ought to tell you why I think -- why I believe you should think -- about the future and why this symposium is an important opportunity to do that. It's my opinion, as a futurist, that skills and thinking about the future both are and will be as important as knowing about history in shaping your perceptions of the present, with the result that you gain three benefits.
First of all, you make improved decisions in present time; secondly, thinking about the future will open to you some new opportunities,and of course some new threats, but we can think of threats as just an opportunity in disguise; and then, finally, it will clarify your own assumptions about the future. We found that most people think about the future in a sort of implicit way. They have many ideas and assumptions about how things are going to turn out, but going through the exercise as you are doing in this symposium, actually thinking about the future, clarifies for you what you believe about it. And I guarantee you that doing so will give you a new perspective on the decisions you make when you go back to your own museums.
I don't expect you to agree with me. I don't really think that I can tell you very much that is new. This is a highly-educated, sophisticated audience. All I hope to do is to stimulate your thinking in this symposium so that when you return to your work, you will look at your museum with fresh eyes. To do that, I'm going to talk about six broad trends or forces that are shaping the world of 2025 and try to connect those trends with some implications for museums in general.
First of all, I'm going to talk about globalization and how the world in 2025 will be three worlds, not one. The different characteristics of each of those three worlds will create different needs for what museums can offer. Secondly, I'm going to move on to the driving demographic trend around the world, which is the move into cities, and how that huge trend is creating what we call an urban mind, which will in 2025 predominate as a world view.
The third point is to discuss the changing attitudes and increasing domination of the middle class and their values and what that will mean for how museums conduct themselves in the future.
Number four is the development of images as the primary means of communication based on the enabling technology which makes this possible and how this affects people's lives and will in the future.
Number five is education, a key mission of museums. The world in 2025 will be, as the President says, an environment for lifelong learning. What kind of challenges are implied for all of us in making that a reality for everyone?
Finally, our move, by 2025, to a knowledge-driven world and what that will mean for changes in our work and in our lifestyles. Then I'm going to wrap that up and Richard will moderate your opportunity to argue with me and to ask questions and make comments. Oh, one caveat you should keep in mind. This is a short talk and, as we all know, the complexity of the world is getting greater, not less. I can only talk about a few aspects of the picture. In deference to the international guests who are attending this seminar, I have to say that this is a North American view. I grew up as a European but I have absorbed a lot of North American thinking and one of the really great difficulties in thinking about the future is to bring in all kinds of views other than your own. It's our own problem with thinking outside the box.
When I was thinking about how to construct this presentation, I did what futurists often do when looking to project something into the future and I generated a few ideas about what roles museums might play in 2025, based on their current capabilities. Now, some of these I think will be familiar to you. Let me just run through them.
First of all, the museum as warehouse: keeping the glorious, beautiful, rare and exotic things and also a bunch of mundane stuff. Now, I can see this role only increasing because there may be more people to share the use of these repositories. I think your future concerns for security are going to be very important. In some ways, there's a great similarity between a museum and an ocean liner, at least in my mind. Both of them have a beautiful facade and can do wonderful displays and sometimes even really good meals, but the interesting stuff is all in layers underneath that surface and the staff generally won't let you see any of it for security reasons and just reasons of general inconvenience.
Then there's the museum as safe house. This is for all people but particularly as a place that children go to safely. Another element that our young researchers reminded me of is it is a safe house for people who are following their mating and dating instincts. Since there is sort of a lack of those opportunities in modern society, those roles I think can only expand.
Then there's the museum as spiritual experience, which becomes stronger in the absence of strong organized religions. The problem with this is that it tends to raise for you some problems of both moral and political questions, and therefore, as the Secretary has talked about, you can involve yourself in continual problems if you are seen by most people as an alternative to traditional religious experience. Now, this may occur to some museums in some parts of the world, certainly more so than today.
Then there's the museum as image and symbol. This is particularly technically enabled when I checked on the World Wide Web and saw something like 44,000 different entries under museums. One of the risks of this is that you gradually begin to exist on the Web and other electronic areas and run the risk of becoming almost totally virtual.
Then the museum as adventure experience. I was thinking this morning about how we could have museums in which you could experience great hurricanes of history in complete safety, but then I thought well, maybe that's the museum as theme park and that's probably a competitor to most of you in this room.
Then there's the museum as awful warning. When I was a kid, I read Grimm's fairytales as awful warning, but after World War II, there were so many things in real life that we didn't need Grimm's fairytales anymore. I'm thinking of the Holocaust Museum and also the awful warning messages you get in aquariums and in museums of natural history about the environment. Undoubtedly there will be new awful warning museums in the future.
Then the museum as basic shelter, a place to come in out of the rain, a place to take your children when you have custody that weekend. I think if some enterprising person begins to connect this notion of museum as shelter with hotel and travel options, you might get a whole new crowd of people coming here.
And then the museum as the expert in crowd control. You are actually very good at this, managing popular exhibits and understanding crowd behavior. You may, in the future, be able to sell that expertise.
Finally in this list, the museum as home decorating aid. This is the great influence of the museum shop and it sort of blurs the line between the museum and the shopping mall. But I think in most people's homes, there is a piece of really nice stuff from one of the museums that is now part of their domestic surroundings and I have no feelings on whether that's a good trend or not.
But let me turn now to where the world will be in 2025, the three worlds. We've divided them up basically as a way of thinking about the future globally because it's rather difficult to think about the world as one whole entity, although it is. And we've looked at the different characteristics and concluded there are at least three worlds.
| World One is the affluent world, currently the dominant provider of knowledge, services, and high technology. In World One there's about a billion people today by our estimation and we anticipate about 1.4 billion by 2025. Examples are the United States, Japan, and most of Europe.
World Two is a very large and interesting new section of the planet. Basically these are countries who are beginning to get their populations, their economies and their development sort of in line. It's about 3.4 billion people today and it will be about 4.7 billion in 2025. You can think of countries like China, Turkey and Thailand in this category.
|
World Three is the poor, who will unfortunately always be with us, where population growth is overwhelming attempts at development; these countries simply cannot catch up. There's about a billion people today in World Three and there should be about 2.4 billion in 2025. Some examples that should be familiar today: Nigeria, Rwanda, Bangladesh and possibly Brazil, depending on what Brazil does with its governance problems.
|
|
We anticipate about 8.5 billion people in the world by 2025. That's a lot of people to come through the doors. But what's key about that is that most of the people in World One are older. We're all moving out of our child-bearing years in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, whereas everyone else is just moving into theirs. So there are billions of people in the world who are under 25, which tells me there are terrific opportunities for expansion of the children's museum movement.
In World Three, I think museums may find themselves playing a very interesting role as the protectors of disappearing resources of all kinds, including culture. And also as being the models of a better life. One thing that is implied by the development of three worlds and three different strategies is that you need alliances. I think almost nobody can move these days globally without making alliances in the places that you want to be, and new kinds of alliances at that.
We have three worlds with different economic growth: about 2 percent in GDP in World One, which is pretty good - It's not fast, but it's not bad for a slowing economy that's saturated. World Two, maybe 5 to 9 percent. If it gets much towards the 9 percent, it will really begin to stress their infrastructure and environment and probably cause political problems. World Three, unknown, in some cases going backwards.
Let me move to the big trend that's coming out of globalization, and that is the worldwide phenomenon of metropolitanization. The U.S. is already one of the most urban countries in the world, 79 to 80 percent. But about 50 percent of the world's population now lives in urban areas and about 75 percent will by 2025. And most of those people will be living in thin strips of land around the coasts of the world. The coastal cities are becoming the future human habitat.
The urbanization of the U.S. depends a little on our particular demographic characteristics. We are one of the few World One nations still growing in population. We're very sensitive, obviously as a result of that, to immigration. One of the challenges that faces us, and you particularly, is the challenge of creating a stable and prosperous multi-ethnic, multiracial society. The examples around the world don't give us a great deal of confidence but somehow we have to do this between now and 2025 because by then our society will be that much more diverse.
The urban mind that is growing out of the metropolitanization has very interesting characteristics, and if any of you read The New Yorker, by the way, there's a really interesting article in this week's issue about experiencing urban mind in New York. I wasn't really thinking of New York as the model for urban mind, but I guess it could be. It is a tendency to see the natural world as just another resource, a toy, or an amenity and one that should be kept pristine, untouched and available when the urban person needs it.
The trends in tourism are some of the best indicators of the growth of urban mind. The Office of Technology Assessment, before it went to the wall, came up with a 4 percent increase per year in tourism worldwide and tourists in the U.S. and U.S. foreign travel together generates 5.8 million jobs and $73.5 billion in wages and salaries. So it's a very strong factor that reflects the need for rest and recreation that people have when they're living in urban areas.
[You ever get your notes mixed up and find yourself on the wrong page? Well, if I come to the right page, I can turn back because I wanted to say a couple more things about the urban mind but I need to move on. It's one of the problems of an aging population: the deterioration in memory!]
Anyway, let me move on to the long-term shift in values which we now see as also occurring around the world, and that is the move to middle-class values as the dominant set. That comes about in the U.S. because of assimilation of immigrant groups, because of years of prosperity, because of education - we have about 23 percent of the population with some form of college education. [It comes about with] the effects of media showing you how other people live, with the move - critically important - from rural areas to metropolitan areas, to long-term rising real incomes - despite the current problems with stagnation, and the growth of white-collar work. We found that about 70 percent of people in the U.S. identify themselves as middle-class.
What will middle class society hold as values? First of all, they will question authority. It's no longer enough to have a position of authority and therefore assume people will listen to what you say. Now you really have to know what you're talking about, as well. There's a lot more information available and educated people do not need to take what they hear. They take it with a grain of salt because they have ways of checking up on what you say.
Secondly, a middle-class society focuses on quality and durability rather than flash and glitz. You see this occurring in almost everything, including relationships.
Thirdly, they have a tendency to trust institutions and rely on them to take care of problems. If, coming in here this morning, you got yourself into a fender-bender with someone else, you wouldn't get out of the car and argue it out with the other driver -- I don't think. What you would do is call in institutions. You can call in at least three of them: your insurance company, the police, and maybe even a lawyer. Middle class society anticipates that its institutions will serve its needs and be responsive to it.
However, they also believe that those institutions will preserve its safety. Now middle-class-society wants clean air, clean offices, clean water, a safe environment and crime off the streets, and woe betide you if you can't provide those things. However, on the other hand, since we're all educated people, we have a different idea about personal risk. I have a right to say how much risk I want to take personally. So, if I'm skiing and I see a sign that says "Avalanche, Do Not Ski Here," or "Avalanche, Danger," and if I'm a good skier, I can decide to go and ski there. However, if the avalanche comes down and buries me, woe betide you if you don't come and rescue me, which is clearly why some government agencies are now asking people to put up bonds and pay fees for rescue.
You can expect the middle-class society to have new concerns about rights and privacy and to value education more. All of those values will move forward into the next century and intensify. We see World Two, particularly, as developing large groups of people with similar values; [there is] even a thin veneer existing in World Three countries.
Now, the implications for museums I think are fairly clear -- can you respond to middle-class demands? They want you to be fair. Can you be fair? They want information for them to make their own decisions. Can you give them enough information? Are you the arbitors of quality and durability and good experiences that they're looking for? And do you know what you are talking about? And then a final question in relation to that is, are they your friends?
I move on from there to point out that we are creating an emerging world of images as our primary means of communication. They're much easier than words. They're much easier to handle than rational, logical texts. They are more powerful. They are more immediate. They transcend the problems of language until we get machine translation. And they are enabled by the kind of technology we now have available and there's some of it down the hall, which is going to be there for your enjoyment in a little while. If you look at the amount of expanding image dependent technologies in U.S. households, you see that in 1994, 12 percent have a modem, 28 percent a video camera, 31 percent, a PC, 40 percent, a video game system, 64 percent, cable, 51 percent, pay-per-view, 66, more than one TV, 85 percent, VCR, and 95 percent, a TV. Color TV, I'm assuming. And those numbers are going up around the world. UNESCO collects them.
There is a strange data anomaly when I looked at that. The two countries with most TV's per household, it's a very odd two, is Monaco and Bermuda. I thought for a long while until I could figure that one out, and of course the reason is those are very small countries whose major industry is tourism and hotels have TV's.
However, access to computers is not universal at home or in school now. It's about 10.8 or 11 per student, but it should be by 2025 in the U.S. and some other countries. The important question that will determine how fast we develop as an image-driven society will be universal access to E-mail. Some people have suggested this could be done through the Postal Service or a similar public utility.
It has been found that if you can connect people up to their educational community, to their local political community, or, presumably, to their museum community, they feel and act in more participatory ways. It doesn't necessarily make people recluses in their homes. And universal access will deal with some of the have and have-not issues that relate to computer use and image use and eventually tend to make the networks more gender neutral. I think you probably know that the use of the Internet now is 66 percent male.
Now, all these technologies are image-generators and there are more of them coming: multimedia, video on demand, virtual reality and so on. The question for museums, since you deal in images very directly, is: are museums to be the nodes on global and local networks and are you to engage in the electronic management of images? The Smithsonian is doing that a little bit now by putting this symposium on the Internet. Are you going to be the meeting places for the development and the interpretation and the certifying of images as well as educating people about them? Are you going to be the local resources for images, the clip-art depository of the 21st century? Can people do their research through the networks and come into your museums and have access to everything without putting their sticky fingers on a single artifact? And to do this, it's very clear that three-dimensional capacity is going to be really important.
The only thing that I think is somewhat of a danger or threat or should be kept in mind is that in this scenario, the museum becomes a glass house. In an image-driven, electronically-driven world, your management, your operations, your curatorial decisions, your plans for exhibits and so on are all on view and they're all meat for public discussion, as is the case with this symposium, since it's on the Internet. Now of course as we know, only a selected segment of the population is on the Internet, but in the future, that will not be so. Everybody will know everything they want or need to know about you.
It reminds me of that experiment in the zoo, the humans in the cage. I don't know where it was done. Does anybody?
Voice: Denmark.
MS. JARRATT: Yes. Those humans are in fact living in a glass house being observed by other humans. So no one can hide in an image society. The other aspect of an image society is the difficulty of telling what's real and what's not and what's true and what's not.
This brings me to education. Our expectations are expanding about education. K through 12 is certainly not any longer enough, even though there are countries in World Two and World Three that have not achieved this yet on a universal basis. When we did an analysis of the forces influencing education a few years ago for the NEA, we drew them a big systems diagram and one of the things that became clear to us was that there are primary, secondary and tertiary parts of the education system but the quaternary part, which is everything informal, including public libraries, the backs of cereal boxes, the Reader's Digest, and what you hear from your doctor about the illness you have, including support groups, is all part of the quaternary system. It's getting bigger and it's getting more and more important to education as we seek lifelong education and as we seek to get education through electronic means.
So by 2025, we won't anymore really differentiate between the formal childhood and informal adult parts of education. They will be one seamless system.
What does lifelong learning currently amount to? Well, for a lot of us, it's job training, maybe more late entrant degrees, an essential aid to your career management. The thing you have to think about, though, is in 2025, more people will be spending time not working. I'm not deliberately not saying unemployed, because I think we have to change that by then, because we're probably going to be able to do all the work at least in the U.S. and in World One countries that we need with about 70 to 75 percent of the population. So many of our children and some of us will have to plan our careers with some idea that we're going to be spending several years not working.
So we may move to the military model: when you're not fighting, spend your time learning how to fight, and learn a lot of other things that are going to improve the quality and expertise of the military as a whole. But the questions I think are going to be profound. What do I do when I know I have to make a transition to part-time work at age 50? Or when I'm told I have to take my share of nonworking next year? I think that many people will come to bring education in those nonworking times as an important part of their life cycle and spend a lot more time in it. Almost everything everywhere will come to be seen as a learning environment.
One aspect of this, if we use images to do it, will be a much stronger entertainment component because that's one of the ways that images reach people most directly. One of the things that's happening in the primary and secondary area of education now is the schools without walls movement. It started out and was driven by the home-schooling parents who estimate now they have about 750,000 to one million children in home schooling. I think that's inflated, but it's a model for the future.
The future school without walls is basically a virtual school, computer-based and customized to each child's needs. There's really no reason why everyone should learn the same things at the same time. It's the industrial model, efficient in a factory sense: children are sausages going through a processing factory. But it's not any longer as effective or necessary for a knowledge economy. So the schools without walls, the ones that don't have their own shelter and buildings, are going to be tremendously dependent on you. You may be one of the key quaternary sources that they need to function effectively and to look at the world outside their own small educational community.
I think it's inevitable that you will follow or lead the example of both business and education today in customizing your services and products to each individual child or adult. Now, how could you do this? How could you do this for me? Well, I talk on-line with the museums's intelligent agent before I visit. In doing so the museum collects an electronic profile of me: what I'm interested in, what my goals are, what my preferences are and so on. When I actually arrive at the door, I enter my name on the welcome screen -- or speak my name -- and the system delivers for me a customized tour guide detailing what I should see, reserving a table for me in the restaurant and marking my menu with offerings I might like and also giving me a list of exciting items on sale in the museum shop, especially as they relate to what I've said I'm interested in. A special fee for all this? You bet, but I would pay!
The way in which education serves work is also changing. If you look at one particular area of work, distributed work, this leads to the invisible worker. These are people who don't have to worry about location, office, downtown; they can work anywhere. They can work in Australia for a U.S. company or in Bangladesh for a company in Japan. Providing they have the electronic connections, they can do their work any place in the world. This is creating something of a problem for management because management isn't used to dealing with invisible workers.
But I think the movement towards more on-line life for everybody is also going to create for you the invisible patron: somebody you never see but who is using your services all the time.
Oh, I come back to one of the urban mind questions that slowly floated into my struggling brain here, and that is that the U.S. development in urban areas is to the polynucleated city, which means people have gone away from downtown where the museums are, so you have to contemplate what the trends are in metropolitanization and think about that in terms of extensions of where you're going to be or new sites in which you should be, where in fact the people are. But generally speaking, location is going to be a lot less important for work, and so in some senses, you aren't going to know where the people are that you want to pull into your museum.
You have seen new expectations on you as a result of the changing work force and the potential for structural unemployment and not-working time, and that is, for example, 24-hour operations. We have a 24-hour work day now. People pass off work around the world. People can work any time and at any place. Why shouldn't they refill their spiritual and aesthetic tank at any time at any place?
I think the other thing that you're going to have to worry about, for most people at least in the immediate future, is the pressure and stress on time, particularly in women and working mothers. This is probably the first time that we've had a situation in which there's no one at home during the day, and in which the time pressure is so great that everybody thinks even about fun and recreation in terms of whether they can afford the time rather than the cost. So the idea of tailored visits to museums or tailored museums that have kind of an executive summary exhibit and all the rest that you can get to later is maybe not too crazy.
It's time for me to wrap this up so we can have a conversation. Let me just summarize quickly:
| Three worlds with three different sets of needs for museums.
The urban mind - people will need you to remind them about the natural world. |
The growing middle-class values around the world, are they friends or foes of the future of museums? |
The potential for you to be leaders in the new forms of communication by image. |
And then how does the museum maximize its role and influence our move to lifelong education? |
And how do you handle the new work styles, the vanished, the disappearing worker, the invisible worker and the 24-hour work day and the demand for services at times when they're not traditionally offered?
|
|
[APPLAUSE]
MR. KURIN: Questions are open on the floor to both Jennifer and the Secretary.
Yes. When you stand up, say your name first.
Voice: Elaine Hoagland, Association of Systematics Collections.
I thought it was important the comment you made about thinking outside the box and I would like to take you outside of a particular box of your future trends and that is, as a biologist, I would like to look at and explore the obvious trends that we see in coming up against resources. Water is going to be scarce, soil is going to be scarce, natural resources, loss of biodiversity, all those kinds of questions. I think that in some of those cases there are going to be gradual increases in trends. In other cases we are going to run up abruptly against major discontinuities. I think that will affect such things as leisure and how people look at their external environment and I wonder if we could discuss some of those concepts.
MS. JARRATT: Yes, that's the awful warning capability of museums, in many cases doing a very good job of telling people about this. I am not one of those futurists who sees us heading into disaster. I think, as you say, we will experience some serious discontinuities, particularly in things like clean water supply. I'm not sure, I think you got a good handle on this. The problem with it is how do you convey bad news without depressing people so much that they don't function to solve the problems? You know, how do you manage in a situation where there's going to be a lot of conflict because there's more demand without making people throw up their hands and say "you know, there's nothing we can do about this," because I think that's exactly the opposite of what you want. Now, we have found that in delivering bad news about the future, we have to be very careful to say what the opportunity is in that unpleasant situation. And I think that's a concept that we all ought to think some about in professional terms, about how we do that.
I found in teaching students about the future that many of them are very sobered by what they learn about the greenhouse effect, about water problems and about the whole world problematique and it takes them a lot of work and a lot of thinking to get beyond that so that they can feel reasonably positive about the future again. If we don't have a positive image of the future, we won't have a future.
MR. KURIN: Good question.
Voice: I have a question that addresses inclusiveness.
MR. KURIN: Identify yourself.
Voice: Jim Joy from the HMS Beagle Group.
Most American cities right now, at least older cities, are actually experiencing a net loss of population. The middle class continues to flee to the suburbs. Other groups flee back to the south or to the southwest, actually away from the coast. The people who are moving back into these cities are either younger or represent groups of people of color who bring with them a different culture. They're more pluralistic with different languages and they are aspiring to get to be middle class. Now, most institutions being in cities, can't physically move. What are they going to do to address these new groups of city people?
MR. KURIN: Jennifer, do you want to take that first?
MS. JARRATT: [Mr. Heyman] why don't you take that one first.
MR. HEYMAN: With great difficulty. You know, that's a concern of so many institutions in this society, but from my perspective with regard to places like the Smithsonian, we have to just include the histories of more people so that the institution becomes theirs as well as somebody else's, and we have to thus make the institution a lot more user friendly for groups that have not used it previously, and then with respect to the programs in the museums themselves, if they're viewed as user friendly and if the institution is used as everybody's and not simply as white people's institutions, I think they can impact and be effective.
I think this is a very tough task, because as I look at the Smithsonian, there has been a real effort, especially with African-Americans in the past eight to 10 years, really a deep and serious effort, both in terms of people who work here, people who manage the institution, people who program the institution. And yet the proportion of visitors from, at least this metropolitan area who are African-American, has not gone up particularly. It's episodic, it goes up from time to time with respect to a particular event and then it recedes again in terms of constant visitation.
That doesn't mean that we should quit, obviously, but it does mean that it's a very, very tough thing to overcome. I remember quite well experiences at Berkeley where great efforts, successful efforts were made to integrate the student body, especially the undergraduate student body in a setting of a really elite educational institution. The difficulties of proposing enough activities that really mixed people, that got people together comes very slowly. Actually, there, I'm beginning to see some success, but that's after intense effort over a long period of time with a self-selected group of people who are all coming there for the same objectives. So that if you can't make it there, I don't know where you can make it. It's tough, but I don't know any other way to go except the way that I've indicated the Smithsonian has gone with respect to African-Americans.
MR. KURIN: Jennifer, is it possible to address the question with regard to the rest of the world, World Two? Do you you find the same problem with respect to museum institutions, given increased urbanization.
MS. JARRATT: Yes. I don't know that they yet experienced the inclusivity questions. I think they probably will see museums somewhat differently as an aid in improving their economic situation because they have got so much investment in making it as World One nations and jump-starting their education. So I think they will probably look at it. Here again is the problem with the North American view but I'm going on the basis of conversations I've had. I think they will look at it as part of their competitive edge, rather than in a sense of trying to include everybody. You were the one who talked to me, though, about the possibility of including people in terms of their own economy and alliances in relationship, not so much to what you can do for them but what they can do for you. I don't know if you want to say anything about that.
MR. KURIN: Maybe later.
MS. JARRATT: Okay.
MR. KURIN: Yes.
Voice: My name is Maria Horta, and Jennifer I very much appreciated what you have explained to us for the future. But, coming from Brazil, I cannot resist to make some remarks about your dark prognosis. I think one of the dangers of globalization may be one of the good things of globalization, and the danger of high technology is that people are not fully aware and do not have the whole picture of what is happening in other parts of the world. Maybe your dark prognosis about Brazil, I believe is lacking information and tomorrow I will be able to tell you a little bit about it. But I really would say that, if we have really a whole part of the country in the pace of rapid development and industrial production, I cannot see the basis for this perspective of Brazil in the same way as other poorer countries.
I recognize there are a lot of destitute people in Brazil, as much as there are in other first-world countries; this is not more than 20 percent of our population. What museums can do for these people, we will discuss tomorrow. I think the danger of this customizing of information, that you pointed out, is that perhaps society will become more fragmented than it is already today, individualism will grow as far as it will have the knowledge you want to have and you need to have and that's enough for you. So those are some of the points that I would like to make. Sorry.
MS. JARRATT: I just wanted to say that I think that's an extremely valid point of view that you use: museums and their structure to unify people within a culture, and I think that's very appropriate in what you're saying. I think Brazil has enormous potential to be the powerhouse of South America. The problem is in governance, not in its economy. The question is: the decisions that the government makes over the next 10 or 15 years really will determine whether it is a World Two or even World One nation or whether it's a bottom edge World Two going into World Three. I had quite a shock when I read the IMF numbers on Brazil over the past few years. If we get a chance, I'd love to talk to you about what it's like living in that kind of roller coaster situation. But I appreciate your positive view of that.
MR. KURIN: I think we have a chance for maybe one more
Voice: My name is Beth Wilson, Curator of Education at the DAR.
My question I would like you all to address: how do you see the roles of larger institutions like the Smithsonian complementing smaller museums that are not able to fund technological advances, such as computers or kiosks that can customize a tour. We are all in the same city and we're all moving toward the same goal, and I'm curious to see how you all feel that larger institutions will complement the smaller museums in areas such as Washington or New York.
MR. HEYMAN: Well, I think that the possibilities are really there. If you just look at it in terms of the self-interest of the larger institutions, ie. the Smithsonian in this context, it's to our advantages to work out the kinds of affiliations that I mentioned briefly. The issue is really going to be resources.
There is no way that it's going to be possible for us to do that without building a resource base that's bigger than the one that we presently have. What thats going to mean to the kind of programs that can be sold to the public funders presently, I think is really quite doubtful, unless the political base for that is enlarged considerably. Whether private support can be raised for those purposes is probably not quite as bleak, but it's not probably so good. So there will have to be some kind of funding base if there's going to be a kind of a subsidy from the point of view of the Smithsonian.
From the point of view of sharing what we have-where it is paid for-I think there's an enormous amount of potentiality. As a matter of fact, one of the things I was going to say and it sort of fits together with a couple of comments made were that, as you look at movement in metropolitan areas, even if the central city doesn't lose population, the burgeoning part of population is still in suburban areas around metropolitan places.
We are being sought after now, in a number of instances, by developers of large developments outside of central city to do something in those settings from the point of view of the development. The developer thinks this is good marketing from the developer's point of view. And we're very seriously looking at those kinds of opportunities to bring what we have elsewhere and not rely soley on people coming to us. I don't think it's going to be very difficult to convince my colleagues in various museums that the Smithsonian should participate in those kinds of activities, but the funding for this is going to have to come from other places because there's no way we can expand in that way in terms of present realities.
I did want to say one last thing and it goes back to a point that was being made in three or four different places. I don't know the extent to which one ought to think normatively, when you're in a role like mine, in the sense of what ought the role of the Smithsonian or other museums be in dealing with the circumstances of life. Not what's going to make us more successful, necessarily, but ought we be playing a role that's a creative role in relationship to the circumstances in our country? And here I am not only being North American but I'm being United States North American.
I personally believe in agreement with what you said, that one of the critical problems of this society is to create a stable multi-ethnic environment. One that's productive, where we can get along with each other, where making determinations in a stereo-typical and surface sense on the basis of race and ethnicity begins to get less, rather than to be stable. One in which there really is a much broader participation than historically has been true. And by the way, I am one who thinks that the United States does a hell of a lot better than most other countries in the world, but the problems are really significant and deep.
And if we look at our own demography in terms of where immigration is coming from - legal, illegal, however, but where it's going to continue to come from, natural increases with respect to birth rates within the United States, we become a country that is less white and it becomes even more important in a pragmatic sense for this country to find ways to stabilize and to make productive the relationships of people from various backgrounds. I think museums can be very helpful in that regard. I don't think museums can solve the problem but I think they can be very helpful. One of the ways that I think they can help is very old fashioned, but we ought to think about the celebratory part of the role of museums: celebrating a lot of events and not simply the events of white ancestors in the United States.
I think, for instance of [the National Museum of ] American History here, bringing in the actual lunch counter [see "Sitting for Justice"]so you can see it as one of those images involved in the creation of the civil rights movement as a political movement in the United States. Or, look at large exhibits with respect to life and how life is lived in various communities such as "Field to Factory" also at American History. I think these kinds of setting are very, very important. The message that one comes back with affirms and confirms the experience of the people who are in that exhibition. The other message is the similarity of human experience and the similarity of human desires and the similarity of the vast majorities of people with regard to what's good in life, what are modes of behavior and the like. The more that's driven home, I think, the more it becomes probable, the more we lay an infrastructure with respect to acceptance and integration. This might be a somewhat naive view of a 66-year-old urban liberal from the east who lived most of his life in the west, but I really believe that strenuously.
I hope you are going to talk about this some time in the course of this symposium. If that idea is a right one, and if we do draw some kinds of priorities with respect to what we're doing, then we can't do everything and we can't do everything in a lot of different ways. The dimensions of choosing out a particular mission and pushing it hard are important and there are important costs as well as benefits that come from that. I hope you will talk about that some because I believe what I just said very, very deeply.
MR. KURIN: Thank you. We will break on the note that, if that's true and that museums serve that function in a pro-active, on-going nation-building type of way, then maybe the U.S. is not in that first category of Jennifer's but really in the second. Anyway, let's take a break and come back at 10:30.
[BREAK].
Go back to Proceedings page
