Social Medias - The Personal Museums of the Future

There are 300.000 works of art in the world’s famous Louvre Museum in Paris. If one wanted to see everyone of it, spending 30 seconds on each, it would take 104 24-hours day to see them all. In January 2009, the hosting site Flickr provided access to over 3 billion photographs, making the Louvre’s collection of objects seem tiny in comparison. Furthermore, every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded on Youtube.  Most of the content posted is personal and meant to be viewed by less than 100 persons.

It is an interesting paradox that people are tempted to post personal contents on a worldwide viewed platform. I therefore consider Flickr, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube as the personal galleries of our lives version 2.0. Shared to the world, photos and videos become an open content to the public, yet they are meant to be in a way personal.

People share a lot of personal contents in websites like Flickr, Instagram, Youtube, MySpace or Facebook as the numbers show. While Facebook is meant for an exposition to people one knows, Instagrams works differently. Ideally meant to be used between friends, in practice the contents can be accessed by anyone who desires to do so. By scrolling through one’s profile, anyone can learn about the life of that person from the photos posted. The expression “personal museum” can be therefore understood two ways. The first is that these kind of websites are the museum of one’s life, a museum for one to remember his life. But the second understanding is that they are a real museum for anyone who visits the galleries of pictures and videos of one’s profile. An interesting concept has been developed in 2011 and turned into an application. Called Museum of Me, this app turns your Facebook profile into a virtual museum with the click of a button. It is like taking a walking tour of a virtual museum where all the rooms and galleries display exhibits you.

To conclude, the Internet is made nowadays of an incredible amount of small museums. This trend is shown by the results of the Shorty Awards category “The Best Museum in Social Media”, an award that honors the best in social media. The winner is Emily Graslie with her tumblr page “The Brain Scoop”where she posts videos, photos, and drawings. She appears before the Museum of Oxford or Westminster Abbey. One can therefore question itself if the memories of our lives will be better kept in the future thanks to the enormous amount of content or if the opposite will happen, due to the ephemeral nature of the storage.

References:

·   •  Agarwal, A. (June 01, 2011) Turn your Facebook Profile into a Virtual Museum in Digital Inspiration. Article available at:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/facebook-virtual-museum/19465/ [Access date: 03/06/2013]

·     •   Graslie, E. The Brain Scoop on Tumblr.com.  Website available at:

http://thebrainscoop.tumblr.com/  [Access date: 03/06/2013]

·    •  Kaplan, A and Haenlein M. (2009) Users of the World, unite! The Challenges and opportunities of Social Media Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Article available at:

http://michaelhaenlein.com/Publications/Kaplan,%20Andreas%20-%20Users%20of%20the%20world,%20unite.pdf [Access date: 03/06/2013]

• Shorty Awards. (2012) List of results available at:

http://shortyawards.com/category/museum [Access date: 03/06/2013]

·    •   Wikipedia. Entry: Instagram. Available at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram [ Access date: 03/06/2013]

·    •    Youtube. Press Statistics. Available at:

http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html [Access date: 03/06/2013]

·    •   Zarella, D. Viral Content Sharing Report: Motivations in The Social Media Scientist Article available at:

http://danzarrella.com/viral-content-sharing-report-motivations#  [Access date: 03/06/2013]