Abstract
Social media has become an omnipresent part of everyday communication and museums could not but embrace this communicative form to spread their message. Regardless, current methods to evaluate and assess activity on museum social media based on metrics and analytics provided by the social platforms are unable to capture the context, the specificities and the complexity of how communication unfolds. This dissertation takes a different approach. Repositioning museum social media from a tool or use-oriented frame to a socio-cultural frame, it gives the first word to the people who use (or do not use) these accounts, adopting a user-centered perspective. Employing both museological and communicative perspectives towards the use of social media in museums, drawing on affect theory, and using methods from the tradition of museum visitor and audience studies, it suggests a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis and interpretation of users’ experiences in museum social media, which i ...
Social media has become an omnipresent part of everyday communication and museums could not but embrace this communicative form to spread their message. Regardless, current methods to evaluate and assess activity on museum social media based on metrics and analytics provided by the social platforms are unable to capture the context, the specificities and the complexity of how communication unfolds. This dissertation takes a different approach. Repositioning museum social media from a tool or use-oriented frame to a socio-cultural frame, it gives the first word to the people who use (or do not use) these accounts, adopting a user-centered perspective. Employing both museological and communicative perspectives towards the use of social media in museums, drawing on affect theory, and using methods from the tradition of museum visitor and audience studies, it suggests a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis and interpretation of users’ experiences in museum social media, which is constituted by three dimensions: the behavioral, the perceptual and the affective one. Drawing on the findings of a three-stage study conducted (surveys, interviews, analysis of users’ comments), it provides useful insights of how users engage with museums on social media, what they think and anticipate of museum accounts, and how they feel and sense this engagement on social media. Furthermore, social media users who do not follow museums, but have an interest in arts and culture, have the chance to be heard, for the first time, and their saying is truly valuable. Finally, this dissertation, informed by theoretical affective approaches into the analysis of data collected from surveys, interviews and comments, enables new depth to our understanding of how museum followers affect and are affected by museums on social media. It also concentrates on the ways in which relational encounters are shaped between museums and social media users, highlighting how bodies connect, feel, and relate to these environments, and providing us with the apparatus to notice the new senses and sensibilities that emerge.
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