WHAT DO WE MEAN BY PLACE TODAY?
Now that museums are closed and relying on their websites to keep serving the public, there is an influx of virtual gallery tours, studio visits, public programming, online exhibitions, collections database, and more. I have been reading lots of comments about “real” versus “virtual” museums, lamenting the loss of “authentic” museum experiences that are more social and meaningful. “A screen is not the museum,” says Maria Chiara Ciaccheri in her recent article on Medium, yet she proposes that we plan and evaluate virtual tours with the same Visitor Studies’ rigor as physical tours and public programming.
I also propose a holistic over a binary view of museums, and I’d like to take this opportunity to share an excerpt from my 2014 book, Museums in the Digital Age: Chapter 2 (Framing a Changing Museology in the Digital Age), pp. 9-13. 
What do we mean by place today? Does place imply physicality? Not if you consider the validity of places in Second Life, or even when considering common Internet terminology such as “landing on a Web site.” Does place imply locality? James Clifford (1997) gives the example of the great world’s fairs starting in the nineteenth century (London, Paris, and Chicago) where the local was always global. And even more so today with synchronous digital communication technologies such as Skype, chat, web conferencing and the latest, telepresence videoconferencing where place becomes that indeterminate point of intersection within a global network of users; what Casey (1997) refers to as the “omnilocality” of place. Finally, we can ask if place implies permanence? For this answer, we turn both to theory and technology. Feminist theorists such as bell hooks (2000) write about the marginality of women in democratic society, philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1980) write about nomads inhabiting a “special kind of place,” and cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall (1997a), Homi Bhabha (1994), Nestor García Canclini (2001), and Seyla Benhabib (2002) write about the causes and consequences of the migration of classes, races, and ethnicities from the periphery to the center, and the fluctuating nature of that new center. Similarly, developments in mobile and location-based technologies, including virtual and augmented reality, allow us to talk about the transference of place in the digital age. “We are where our devices are,” claim Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011). To describe this portable nature of social connectedness due to online and mobile technologies, Mary Chayko (2008) uses the term portable communities, which are “groupings that use small, wireless, easily transportable technologies of communication (portable technologies) to facilitate interpersonal connectedness and to make and share a collective identity and culture” (p. 8).
There are two main reasons why place has receded for the modern museum; one is due to technology and the other due to the primacy of experience. Both are related, however, as new digital technologies allow for new kinds of experiences, a rather continuous cycle of dependence. In her book on public art, philosophy professor Hilda Hein (2006) argues that the primacy of experiences in the mid-twentieth century served to displace the museum’s collection, coining the term the “experiential museum.” As museums became about experiences–“process over stasis”–they became less connected to place; objects became “vehicles for the delivery of experience rather than as ends unto themselves” (Hein, 2006, p. x). Nevertheless, Hein acknowledges that in our modern society saturated with opportunities for experience and entertainment, the museum is distinguished by the authenticity and materiality of its objects. Visitor experience can still be place-based as museums and other institutions offer experiences within their physical spaces, but ultimately experiences are defined by the individual that receives the experience in a unique manner, and less by institutional intentions. Experiences subjugate the place because they can be taken away by the visitor, stored in memory, and often recalled through various strategies (analog and digital) that may no longer relate to the original place-based experience.
Falk and Dierking (as cited in Tallon & Walker, 2008) concur with this idea that museum experiences detach visitors from the physical museum place.
Since visitors do not make meaning from museums solely within the four walls of the institution, effective digital media experiences require situating the experience within the broader context of the lives, the community, and the society in which visitors live and interact. (p. 27)
While museums certainly are not intentionally trying to drive visitors away from their physical buildings and collections, they have largely come to accept the constructivist notion of how learning and meaning are created by visitors within the context of their personal backgrounds, interests, and lives. Based upon this modern museology is a growing awareness that the emergence of personal mobile technologies allows visitors to experience the museum wherever and whenever they choose. With mobile tours (such as Art on Call at the Walker Art Center), visitors can call a number to hear more about work they are standing in front of–either inside museum galleries, outside in museum gardens or exteriors, or even throughout the city–or visitors can call the number from their home at a later date and time, perhaps never intending a physical visit to the museum. Another new feature called bookmarking creates a stronger connection between the physical museum experience and a pre- or post-museum experience at the visitor’s home (or wherever they may have Internet access). For example, Getty Bookmarks at the J. Paul Getty Museum is a way for visitors to select their favorite works of art and then save them on the museum website in a personal gallery. There are many variations of bookmarks, with functions on audio and handheld tours where visitors are sent e-mails with links to their bookmarks; visitors can access their bookmarks or personal galleries at physical kiosks inside the museum, or through their own smartphones. A few more examples of such personal spaces on museum websites include My Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, My Art Gallery at the Seattle Art Museum, My Scrapbooks at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Art Collector at the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
If place in the digital age no longer implies physicality, locality or permanence, but rather a different form(s) such as those suggested by the scholars mentioned above, then its reemergence in the digital age permits a symbiotic relationship with experience rather than a contradictory one. Furthermore, the proposal of place/experience allows for fluid movement through space and time as well as through society and community in general. In Mobilities of Time and Space, Marita Sturken (2004) refers to the term “nonplaces” first discussed by Marc Augé in 1995. She writes that,
If modernity was characterized by a separation of space and place, in postmodernity, there is an emphasis on the proliferation of nonspaces–airports, freeways, bank machines. The postmodern concept of the nonplace thus bears a contiguous relationship to the modern sense of space as compressed, traveled through, removed from actual places. (p. 79)
This thesis does not negate or reduce place, as in the postmodern concepts of nonplace or nonspace, but proposes the additive, post-Postmodern concept of place/experience that acknowledges its new form(s). Casey similarly suggests that “A place is more an event than a thing to be assimilated to known categories” (as cited in Feld & Basso, 1996, p. 27) and James Clifford (1997) writes about location as “an itinerary rather than a bounded site–a series of encounters and translations” (p. 11).
Ethnographers and anthropologists have long been aware that places are socially and culturally constructed–contact zones–in turn influencing philosophers such as de Certeau, Lefebvre, and even Albert Camus who stated in 1955 that “Sense of place is not just something that people know and feel, it is something people do” (as cited in Basso, 1996, p. 88). This socio-cultural process, however, does not serve to transform place into space, but rather remains an overriding and uninterrupted influence of space, place, and locality throughout their digital transmutations. Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) suggest that, “Now that our devices our [sic] location aware, we are much better positioned to be location aware ourselves” (p. 54). As we pay more attention to place and location today, we must remain conscious of their socio-cultural contextual framework. Referring to the idea of place-based education, David Gruenewald (2003) uses the term place-conscious education to demonstrate the need for the educational field to pay more attention to places. Gruenewald also believes that places are social constructions, calling this term “the new localism” that emerged in response to globalization. As the field of education extends itself outwards towards places, it becomes more relevant to the lived experience of students and teachers that consequently become more accountable so that “places matter to educators, students, and citizens in tangible ways” (p. 620). A consciousness of place, Gruenewald argues, is accordingly a consciousness of ourselves as “place makers and participants in the sociopolitical process of place making” (p. 627). This call for active participation–for place making–is associated with recent calls for increased civic engagement (Putnam, 1995; Asen, 2004) and a recognition of the participatory culture of the digital age.
When places are actively inhabited, created, and shared–like the practiced place of DeCerteau (1984) or the representational space of Lefebvre (1991)–they become public spheres. Jürgen Habermas (1962/1989) expounded on the bourgeois public sphere in his influential book. The public sphere of eighteenth-century Europe united strangers together, requiring only that one pay attention in order to become a member. The more active acts of deliberation, argumentation, and ultimately agreement were also necessary to form the ideal citizen that avoided violence by engaging in reasoned discourse. Directly opposed to Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere is the proletarian public sphere, as first proposed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1972/1993). The most important distinctions are that there is not merely one public sphere but multiple public spheres, and that the concept of community should be replaced with that of counterpublics (Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2005). Today’s public sphere is more accessible and democratic than its predecessors, but discourse remains its defining factor. Museums can be considered public spheres as critical places for individual development because they reflect societal norms and values; they are places where public opinions are formed and presented, and where participation and discourse are encouraged both by peers and authority figures. Museums embrace the idea of the public sphere today; they offer free days to ensure accessibility, free wifi to facilitate connectedness, they host lectures to encourage dialog, create social groups (onsite and online) for their members to interact, and solicit comments from visitors to publicly share.
While the public sphere is a useful concept to emphasize the need for individual discourse, participation, and engagement on a macro level, it is still possible to talk about place, or place/experience, as socio-culturally generated without needing to transform it into other terms like public sphere, space, or public space. Public space is a more contemporary notion of the public sphere that is used in fields such as urban design, public policy, public art, and geography. Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) describe public space as “a collection of minor social contracts” and refer to the urbanist William Whyte’s description of “good” public space as the Seagram Building in Manhattan that encourages casual conversation. Places have not disappeared (Castells, 2001; Lefebvre, 1974/1991), but have certainly been transformed by their inhabitants through changing cultural practices, social relations, and through the developments of digital technology and the ways in which such technologies are culturally adapted.