A discussion about the presence of museums on the internet: new challenges of the communication in museums in the era of social networks

Abstract

What is, in fact, a virtual museum? In this work we came back to this current question in the museology, investigating the possibilities of virtualization (while flux of information in the continuous search for actualization) in the contemporaneous context, where people are digitally interacting through the social networks and they are indexing the content using keywords called hashtags. The popular and spontaneous sharing of the musicological experiences, mainly by images, also is modifying the behavior of the visitors in the physical installations of the museums. In this context, we discuss the possible tools for public evaluation in the digital platforms and the eventual necessity to reanalyze established results about the public behavior in classical museums. Moreover, we are pointing out the possibility of spontaneous emergence of virtual museums, as a consequence of projects aiming to public availability of information. As an example, it is studied the case of the Virtual Museum, initiative of the international astronomical community to share tools and images obtained by telescopes at different energy ranges. We propose that the OV can be seen as a virtual museum, suggestively the “Museum of the Observable Universe”.