Profile-building in the Real World

    The trick to making this work is the individual starting point and the unique user profile. Librarything and online social networks offer highly sophisticated ways to self-identify. In the physical world, I have a few signifiers I can use to create a personal "profile" that expresses my unique identity. I can wear a tshirt for a band I like. I can walk my dog around town. I can display my tattoo. Each of these types of self-identification can lead to social interactions with people who belong to the communities of rockabilly lovers or dog owners or inked folk. The small presentation of self-expression becomes a kind of beacon, a social object that links me to others in my social web of affinity.

    But these sidewalk interpersonal experiences are limited to my personal appearance and objects I carry. It is incredibly difficult for me to display my love of backpacking or Reconstructist Judaism or off-grid living as I walk down the street. On the web, I can display all of these. I can use different websites to express myself relative to different types of experiences and content. The people who I trust for book recommendations on Librarything are not the same as the people I seek for professional connections on LinkedIn. I can express the aspect of my self-identity appropriate to the situation, and then I can use that personal profile as the center of a community experience.

    Why does this matter when it comes to participation? People naturally participate with their friends because they perceive their friends as people who value their contributions. Similarly, people feel comfortable participating in their own physical environments--home, bedroom, cubicle--because those places reflect their personal identity. When it comes to participating with strangers, or participating in foreign environments like museums, people need a starting point that allows them to feel confident about expressing themselves in the new situation. People are more comfortable engaging with strangers when they feel they can fully express themselves. Online dating is popular because it allows the initial connection to be based on more than just physical appearance or first encounters; potential dates can see you "as you really are," or at least as you claim to be. It's easier to approach someone via a known connection than based merely on co-location.

    People also feel validated when they are treated as individuals rather than faces in the crowd. When someone addresses me by name, I appreciate that he has taken the time to remember it, to connect me to an element of my unique identity. While it sounds obvious, many teachers and facilitators don’t think it is worth it to take the time to learn students’ names. If you don’t care to take the effort to learn a visitor’s name, how can you expect that person to take the effort to participate in your project? People are more willing to participate if they feel that their unique contribution is actively and genuinely sought.

    Finally, people are most willing to participate with others via social webs that start with their own unique self-expression because the resultant interaction is more likely to be high-value. If I connect with you based on the fact that we both love underground hiphop, we're likely to have a good conversation about music and learn something from each other. If you approach me because we've both hiked the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska, we may give each other good suggestions for the next mountain to climb. We can introduce each other to new things with confidence starting from the personal profiles each of us has created.

    Of course, there's a dark side to promoting interpersonal connections via individual self-expression. People who operate in these kinds of social networks meet people and get introduced to new experiences that are "like them"—close by on the social web. That's what makes social webs valuable—they generate recommendations validated by the things you already know and enjoy. Some people argue that this kind of social contextualization prevents us from getting exposed to divergent ideas and experiences and that cultural institutions are mission-bound to help visitors get beyond their preconceptions to confront and explore the foreign and unknown.

    I agree with this argument... somewhat. No one lives in her own bubble, especially in a physical context like a museum where it is physically impossible to avoid seeing other artifacts on your way to the one that is socially optimized for your enjoyment. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam observed that there are "deepening" communities and "bridging" communities. He expressed concern that people are increasingly choosing to engage in deepening communities, like churches, where they strengthen relationships with people like them, instead of bridging communities, like bowling alleys, where people from diverse backgrounds "bridge" their differences to form new kinds of interpersonal relationships and understanding. Social webs are a combination of deepening and bridging environments. Yes, they are places to hang out with the people you already know and learn more about content you already care about, but they are also places to discover new and surprising things via the experiences your connection bring your way. In the social web, the personal profile is an entrypoint that frames and contextualizes the initial experience in a way that makes the user feel valued and in control. That confident starting point is a springboard from which people may choose to deepen the relationships they already have, or to bridge out and seek new and unusual opportunities.

    By failing to treat visitors as unique individuals, museums miss the opportunity to hook would-be visitors based on their self-identity and bring them into the museum experience via comfortable, supportive entry experiences. In his book Identity and the Museum Experience, researcher John Falk provided a broad range of examples of how self-identity frames the museum experience and visitors evaluate their experiences based on the institution’s ability to accommodate unique identity needs. This is particularly important when it comes to participatory expeirences. If you are seeking to support visitor participation and self-expression in the context of the museum experience by asking visitors to share stories or impressions, you need to respect them as individuals who have something of value to contribute. The easiest way to do that is to acknowledge their uniqueness, support self-identification, and validate their ability to connect with the museum on their own terms.(And you need to actually issue an invitation to them to participate. Amazing power in invitation. Sets up a completely different dynamic. SB)

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