Artifact #9

This artifact comes out of the New York Times, which makes me feel like it has to be about something that is truthful and more professional that I am use to. It is called the Spirit of Sharing, and is out of the Museum section of the paper. It is about the websites that the museums are using and how they have grown rapidly by how they are used and what exactly is on them. It starts off by telling a little bit about Shelly Bernstein, who works at the Brooklyn Museum, because she is a major part of why that museum is able to be so electronically based. She looks to see how the museum is looked at by many sites on the web. It says that a few years ago all of the museums websites were very boring and just gave out the basic information, but now they are interactive and make the people that visit the site feel more involved with what goes on with the museum because they are able to give feed back. With these new things that the websites are doing make them more popular, a large number of people go to these websites because they are not able to go see the real thing, which is good for many people around the world. The article also points out that some of the things that are popular right now might not be in a few years, and an example was Twitter, which they call a fad. Also, with the new Facebook pages that the museums have they can interact with the followers more, and one example of this is the Date Night for Valentines Days that they set up. They believe that because of all of the followers and the likes they get, all of this new technologies are great for the museums
I think that using social networking sites for any business is a good idea these days because there is a large number of people that use them and could potentially have interests in those businesses, so I don’t see how it could be a bad idea for museums to do this as well. This will most likely get more people to come to the museums, which is the ultimate goal for them. Also, making a website look good and be interactive is crucial these days. A lot of the younger generation do not want to look at anything boring, and if they see that a website is boring they would most likely thing that the actual place is boring also. All of this is really about just trying to connect and interact with the largest amount of people that they can, because this will help with business. To survive these days, you must be involved with technology in some shape or form because that is what our society bases everything on. Sooner or later you will be able to see anything in the world that you want to on a website of some sort, and this could be considered a good or a bad thing, but it seems unstoppable at this point so you must learn to live with it and embrace it.