NET RESULTS:Despite its significance as a major human leap forward, the web cannot really compete as a science museum exhibit, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
WHY IS it so hard to explain the internet? The question occurred to me last week as I visited the Networld section of Chicago’s exceptional Museum of Science and Industry, which prides itself on being “the largest science museum in the western hemisphere”.
Even with a full day for exploring, a visitor can get only a flavour of all that is available to explore in this wonderful place. One needs to select where to linger and where to hurry through.
With great interest, I made an early beeline for the internet section, only to find it was quite possibly the least interesting exhibit.
Granted, the quality of many sections of the museum is incredibly high, so competition for attention is fierce. For example, there’s a fabulous, highly detailed and exciting section on a U-boat recovered – in very dangerous circumstances – after an encounter with a US military team in the second World War. The entire U-boat is contained inside a specially built section of the building.
Then there’s Science Storms, definitely my favourite section. A mini tornado extends up a two- storey space and its swirling smoke can be adjusted by the visitor to see how different factors influence tornado formation.
There are equally fascinating interactive exhibits on avalanches, lightning and tidal waves (I enjoyed designing my own avalanche). I could have watched the terrifyingly exciting storm chasers video several times over.
Then there’s a section on flight, which includes several professional flight simulators and a real 727 suspended from the ceiling, which visitors can board to learn about how jets are constructed and flown.
The area on space exploration has a Mercury and an Apollo capsule, a moon rock, real space suits and a small working model of the Mars land vehicle that visitors can send dashing around a recreated Martian landscape.
But the Networld exhibit just wasn’t very interesting and the fact it didn’t intrigue was emphasised by the lack of visitors.
On a day when the museum was full of groups of schoolchildren rushing around in excitement, none was gathered in Networld. Adults tended to walk in and, fairly swiftly, walk out again.
It isn’t just this museum’s problem. I’ve been to a few science and technology museums, including The Tech in San José, and internet-related exhibits haven’t been very compelling in these other places either.
Why is creating a fun learning environment around what is undoubtedly one of the most exciting technological developments of the past century such a challenge?
Perhaps it is the internet’s virtuality. Sure, there is an infrastructure out there – computers in rooms all over the globe, with fibre-optic cables and copper wires forming an international spiderweb of connections. But most of what makes the internet what it is is intangible, a magical interaction of electricity, and digital ones and zeros.
Perhaps the problem of creating a museum exhibit is exemplified by the challenge facing my own editors any time I write a story on some internet-related innovation.
The editors need a picture to accompany it – but how do you depict, say, cloud computing? Social networking? Hacking attacks? Music downloads? I might have the most exciting story in the world, but all I will get from a long-suffering business editor is a deep sigh, followed by: “Okay, but how are we going to illustrate it?”
In a museum, the wrong approach seems to be to use the medium to explain the medium.
Setting aside the risk of technical glitches (and on the day I visited, many of the exhibits in Networld were down due to technical problems), I think it’s extremely difficult to come up with onscreen ideas that are as engaging and as fun as the things kids and adults do on the internet already.
Maybe there’s an issue of familiarity. We are already doing so much online that just clicking in for further explanations of what you can do online isn’t as interesting as the things you already do when you’re at home.
Why would I want to create an avatar to help me learn things in an exhibit, when I’m already doing more challenging and compelling things as a character in an online computer game at home? Also, I just don’t want to have to read the screen (how many times do you see people in, say, an art museum taking time to explore the interactive exhibits?).
What I want is something that enables me to visualise the concepts in a more concrete way – like the giant spinning wheel of mixing coloured sands that allows the visitor to Science Storms understand an avalanche.
So what would you do to explain TCP/IP, the global “language” of the internet that allows computers to understand each other? Or packet switching, the clever way in which the internet can chop up a large piece of information into lots of little packages, send them off over the network and reassemble them into a coherent whole at its destination?
On the way back to the hotel after our museum visit, a friend and I discussed how such concepts might be made visual and exciting. It was a fun task and all of our solutions very deliberately did not involve using an actual computer screen.
