That different media (in which we can also include architecture) are not just more- or less-effective means of “packaging” content is a point that resounds through the chapters in Part III. Michelle Henning (chapter 18) expands the discussion to new media. By looking not only at recent uses of new media, including “virtual museums,” but also older instances of the employment of digital technologies in museums, she provides an insightful account of the ways in which technologies may variously “organize and structure knowledge and visitor attention.” [...] she is also concerned with how this may interact with political changes in museums, though she raises questions about whether interactivity is necessarily as inherently democratizing as is so often proclaimed.

In this chapter, I argue for a different understanding of new media. I suggest that new media is best thought of as a means to organize and structure knowledge and visitor attention in the museum, not as a means of communication or set of devices. I attribute a transformative power to new media, but one that does not exactly match that envisaged by the new media advocates or skeptics in the museum. In my view, new media is most interesting for what it does to the hierarchies of knowledge in the museum, particularly in relation to the division between “front and back regions” of the museum (the phrase is from the sociologist Erving Goffman; see Goffman 1990). At the end of the chapter, I suggest how a return to ways of organizing knowledge that predate the modern museum offers the most promising possibilities for reinventing museums and new media. To begin, though, I want to lay the foundation of my argument by considering how exhibitions and museums have historically participated in the development of new media and how museums themselves can be considered media.