| The museum uses interactive devices to present exhibits and artifacts pertaining to comedy through the ages. But while the tech is exciting, its core use at the center might prove antithetical to broadening awareness about comedy’s diverse performers and styles.
Each visitor receives a radio frequency identification wristband programmed according to his preferences among comedians, TV shows and movies. Signals from the band trigger displays specifically tailored to those interests. Like me at the dinner table, visitors feast on what they already know they enjoy.
Such segmentation is pervasive in our interactive, digital world. We select the news we want to read, the music we wish to hear, and the stores we choose to shop at. Whatever we "like" online comes back at us relentlessly, reinforcing a narrow focus.
Netflix uses complex algorithms to compute which movies and TV shows users might find interesting based on their previous selections. Its welcome screens include predictions, expressed as percentages, of how closely recommended programs will suit customers’ tastes. At Disney World in Florida, wristbands contain details about a visitor’s preferences—right down to what his ideal order would be at the park’s restaurants.
To what extent should museums embrace this technology? How should they position themselves along the continuum that has what people know they like at one end and what they might discover they like at the other?
A museum devoted to espionage, Spyscape, opened earlier this year in Manhattan. Like the Comedy Center, it uses RFID wristbands to link visitors’ experiences to their interests. The Tronvig Group, a New York City marketing firm that advises museums, favors giving patrons more of what they want. "No amount of marketing is going to make something interesting to them, if they are not actually interested in it," declares a post on its blog.
That seems both cynical and misguided. In his 2016 book, "The Return of Curiosity," Nicholas Thomas writes that museums are rewarding for their "unexpected discoveries of pieces that may be minor in art-historical terms or otherwise supposedly of secondary interest but that appeal to you nevertheless, that enable you to know something new or that take you somewhere you have not previously been."
Unlike a Disney fantasy experience or a movie selection on Netflix, a visit to a museum should be mind-expanding. The challenge for exhibitors as they seek to attract customers is to use new technology to enhance the experience without succumbing to segmentation. Their goal should be to tell me something I don’t know.
(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
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