Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
Each time, I was told by the machine that I scored "below average". I think of myself as a fairly "green" person, and in any case I had given what I thought were "greenish" answers. I came away bemused. Perhaps someone else has the right answers? How does the machine want me to respond? The fellow migrant who sat with his ten-year-old child next to me agreed. Leave it to the experts, he said. And that appeared to be the message the medium was conveying. If one did not know the museum better, it would have seemed that its environmental management philosophy was to be of" the people, but not by the people, we were left wondering whether it was even forthe people. There is no doubt, of course, that museum staff are aware of such factors, and are doing their best to review the use of interactives in the light of experience. But the difficulty remains. All being said, interactives probably fare more easily with the public than do histories of scientific ideas, or appeals to self-improvement, or stories of intellectual failure. The science museum must remain the last bastion of the idea of progress. Possibly, the science museum will also be the last bastion of folly. The visitor becomes like Charlie Chaplin, the humble worker, caught in the mechanism of Modern Times. Conclusion Throughout the world, science museums are recognising the fact that "showing science" has become a matter of managing knowledge. Telling the history of nature or the history of technology, requires using objects to engage, illuminate, and to persuade. The risk, at the outside, is that science museums will become EPCOTS, enshrining knowledge for its commodity value, and disregarding human elements which fail to purchase or consume. Such a prospect - encompassing the metonymies of the international exhibition, the loan collection, the national pavilion, the orderly, sanitary environment of a Florida Erewhon, a Tudor Utopia and a Solomon's House may become the vision that science wills for the future. How museum professionals and the taxpaying, entrance-paying public will resolve the issue remains to be seen. The antidote to the authoritarian rhetoric of utopia is, of course, the reality of everyday life. But this means negotiation, and controversy. Should exhibits of science be rated "X"? If so, by whom? And whom should we admit to see them? In conclusion, the science museum presents our discipline with opportunities to develop and apply frames of thought already familiar to the social history of science and the sociology of knowledge, in directions which are, demonstrably, of enormous educational and political importance. We can take encouragement from the more innovative institutions to draw out themes, which will in time become truisms:
