Museums in the age of platform giants: Disconnected policies and practices

Digital cultural politics respond to and shape patterns of cultural production and consumption. Such politics are enmeshed within externalities where large tech companies are increasingly powerful. Companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are influential in forming the cultural representation and identity formation of users, as they provide services and facilitate interfaces that are extremely popular and widely used. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Tik Tok are platforms which afford specific communication, content creation and distribution channels. Their global popularity creates interdependencies, as these are platforms that people already are accustomed to and engage with. These interdependencies are not only constructed between platforms and single users, but also between platforms and principal societal institutions on a government level, within the market sector, as well as in civil society.

Museums are among such institutions, as they have embraced these platforms’ dialogical potentials and applied them to interact with guests and users in new ways. Museums have also digitised large parts of their collections and made them available online. This is aligned with new museology, which, among other things, has advocated for audience development and democratisation of the museum institution (Vergo, 1989; Anderson, 2004; Marstine, 2006). While digital collections and popular platforms certainly facilitate the realisation of such potentials, there are also challenges that museums face when designing their digital collections and conducting communication via social media platforms. Digital cultural politics attempt to respond to and shape patterns of cultural production and consumption, both discursively and in practice. Museums do this typically by forming policies or by explaining in various strategies, reviews and reports how and why they design their online collections and engage in communications generated and distributed by major platforms. The aim of this article is to zoom in on the digital politics of museums, with focus on and analysis of the digital cultural politics of the British Museum (BM) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA). More specifically, this article inspects how these museums discursively frame their digital cultural politics and how this framing fits their management of online collections. Furthermore, the article investigates how these museums apply social media platforms and how this application further relates to the media ecology of platform giants.

Methodological and empirical framework

Methodologically, this article applies: textual analysis to examine how the museums discursively shape their digital cultural politics; interface analysis to demonstrate how they organise their online collections; and platform analysis to examine their communication patterns on Instagram. Instagram is chosen as an example of a platform that is owned and operated by one of the big platform providers, namely Meta Platforms, Inc. Furthermore, Instagram is one of the most popular platforms in digital museum communication and both museums have an active presence on the platform.

The textual analysis of the museums' digital cultural policies and the interface analysis is inspired by Foucault's theory of discourse and governmentality. This is well suited to demonstrate how particular politics and interface constructions favour and amplify specific sets of knowledge which cluster into dominant discursive formations (Foucault, 2002b). These clusters construct topics and systems of thought over time through complex processes of definitions, inclusions, exclusions, and difference; or as Hall so accurately formulates it in his reflections on Foucault's account of discourse:

It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others. (Hall, 1997: 44)

This emphasis on regulating the conduct of others is closely related to Foucault's account of governmentality, which is power that directly refers to populations, not just as collective masses, as it ‘also implies the management of population in its depths and its details’ (Foucault, 2002a: 219). This kind of power resonates both with how users/guests are disciplined to follow specific paths when visiting onsite museums (Bennett, 1995), as well as when following the prescribed routes which interface constructions of online museum collections and platforms like Instagram facilitate. This does not just account for the visible part of such communication, but also the underlying platform logics which algorithmically construct representation patterns and leave trails of data, which the platforms use and exploit for various purposes. To further inspect the function and politics of Instagram, the platform analysis applies insights from Van Dijck's (2013) account of platforms as techno-cultural constructs and socio-economic structures, as well as activating parts of the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018b). In my adaptation of these approaches, I focused on the museum's vision, operating model, governance, the user interface, arrangement, functions and features, textual content and tone, usage, ownership, business model and regulation.

Empirically, the article focuses on: key documents in which the museums describe their digital policies, such as strategies, reports, and reviews; the management of their online collections; and the museums’ profiles on Instagram. I limit the communication on Instagram from 1 January 2020 to 1 November 2021. This timeframe is chosen as it gives an ample overview of the communication modes, tactics, and themes which the museum professionals employ on Instagram. These museums are chosen as they are high-profile museums in their respective countries and have clear public obligations. They are public museums which identify strongly with new museology and therefore have a remit that embraces accessibility, and that have had to enhance their digital offerings during the lockdowns associated with Covid-19. They therefore serve as ideal cases for further discussion on how established and renowned museums at a national level choose to formulate their digital cultural politics, and whether such formulations are aligned with their organisation of online collections and communication on social media platforms. The timeframe for the document analysis, or what I refer to as digital cultural politics as policy, is longer than that for collections and platforms. The reason for this is that policies are usually slower to manifest as concrete action plans and practices. By accounting for key documents over a longer period of time, dominant discourses will be identified and compared to key writings on new museology. Before we take a further look at the two museums’ digital cultural politics as policy, collection, and platform, I will start by discussing the museum in the age of platform giants.

Museums, digital collections and social media

Covid-19 forced an acceleration of museum engagement with digitalisation, the construction of digital collections and communication on social media platforms. As will be apparent in the section on digital cultural politics as policy, the BM and the NMA, explicitly address this in quantitative terms, as well as in accounting for new initiatives that were launched during the lockdowns. However, even though the museums scaled up in terms of digital communication, this was an upscaling in terms of volume rather than in engaging actively with their users or in facilitating online environments which shifted the power balance between museums and museum professionals, and users.

This contrasts with much of the research being conducted on the intersections of museums and digital communication, where the dialogical potentials of digital communication are often highlighted. Terms such as the media museum, the connected museum, museum 2.0, the mediatised museum, the transmedia museum, and the digital museum broadly place museums in the digital age (see for instance Parry, 2007; Simon, 2010; Russo, 2012 ; Drotner and Schrøder, 2013; Drotner et al., 2019; Pavement, 2019). Generally, these writings acknowledge that digital communication and digital platforms provide opportunities in terms of user engagement and participation, in democratising onsite and online museum spaces, in innovative dissemination tactics, and in evening out power relations. These opportunities are well suited to realise recurring claims within new museology, critical museum theory, and new museum theory, which emphasise the need to re-stage and re-frame objects and audience involvement, and to change narratives of one-dimensional control to narratives that underscore diverse views, transparency, decolonisation, and the willingness to share power. Marstine, for instance, suggests the term post-museum, to indicate a shift in the role of visitors, who are perceived as active participants, rather than passive consumers: ‘Instead of transmitting knowledge to an essentialized mass audience, the post-museum listens and responds sensitively as it encourages diverse groups to become active participants in museum discourse’ (Marstine, 2006: 19).

There are many resemblances between shifts from ‘old’ to ‘new’ museology, and voices that celebrated the democratic potential inherent in digital communication. This is particularly so at the user level, where dynamic conceptualisations like creative audiences (Castells, 2009), productive enthusiasts (Gauntlett, 2011), interactive audience (Jenkins, 2006), produsers (Bruns, 2008), proams (Leadbeater, 2000), and social media entertainers (Cunningham and Craig, 2019) are meant to indicate shifts in the power balance of producers, users, and consumers. Essential to such transitions are changes in the power dynamics between institutions and visitors, professionals and amateurs, and the governance of established one-directional gatekeepers and governing approaches that facilitate multiple gates. There are, of course, many examples of such transitions and much of the digital communication techniques that museums apply are fine examples of this (Parry, 2007; Srinivasan et al., 2009). However, it is important to distinguish between different forms and applications of digital tools facilitated by museums, and how these connect to the larger infrastructure that is very much in the hands of major platform providers, like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

In this context, I would like to draw attention to at least three different forms of technological applications with regard to museums. First, many museums use in-house designs to disseminate parts of exhibitions, such as audio-guides, location-based media, VR, and other forms of technology. These are technologies used within the museum space by onsite museum visitors. Second, there are offsite products designed for both in-house and offsite purposes, such as apps that support exhibitions, or the numerous digital projects and productions on the web that further relate to functions of museums. An example of this would be the making and arranging of online museum collections, which can be enjoyed online, but which can also provide valuable information on onsite objects. Third, there are social media platforms, like Instagram, which can be used by museum guests and professionals to demonstrate and give information on onsite activities, as well as for communicating with users offsite. The first type is usually independent of social media, while the second type is often enmeshed within the logic of social media, as museums provide links from their digital collections to be spread via various social media services. The online collections and the communication on Instagram that will be further discussed in this article are the second and the third types of such applications. However, in an interconnected platform society, these distinctions are hard to demarcate, as the infrastructural backbone of internet communication, and the multitude and popularity of services from the tech giants, interlink in various ways and, importantly, they create interdependencies which have proved difficult for cultural institutions to circumvent.

The platform ecosystem is a system of connections. As Van Dijck et al. (2018) point out, the dominance of the major platform assemblages, in terms of global connectivity, ubiquitous accessibility and network effects, make non-reliance from public and non-profit platforms, or institutions, difficult. Of course, ultimately, publicly funded museums can choose whether to direct their users towards the platform ecology of major commercial social media. It really depends on the museums’ digital cultural politics and whether they perceive the gains to outweigh the drawbacks.

In terms of Instagram, the gains are to be able to bring posts, pictures, videos, tags, comments to your followers, and to engage in dialogic communications with them. This view celebrates the potential of cultural participation via interfaces that provide access to online collections or social media platforms like Instagram. Within museum studies, there are views that encourage the use of social media, as they are perceived as ideal ways to facilitate participatory forms of communication and can transform the relations between museum professionals and users. Kelly, for instance, states that ‘social media provides the perfect vehicle to take these ideas further with the transformative museum enabling learners, users, visitors to become participants wherever they are and however they choose’ (Kelly, 2013: 68). This is a view which corresponds with the engaging and participative potentials of produsers, creative and interactive audiences, productive enthusiasts and proams. However, as Crawford (2009) notes, such dynamic and often visible features of digital communication (posting, responding and commenting) is not attentive to what she terms listening as a form of participation and online engagement. According to her, listening therefore ‘reframes a set of behaviours once seen as vacant and empty into receptive and reciprocal practices’ (Crawford, 2009: 527). When analysing the BM's and the NMA's communication on their online collections and on Instagram, it is therefore important to be aware of these different forms of participation and to be attentive to whether listening practices shake the power relations between users and museum professionals.

Despite these nuances between different forms of participation, other voices within museum studies are more sceptical towards museums’ use of social media, and question their democratic and participatory potentials, ownership structures and ethics (Kidd, 2011, 2014), as well as whether visitors/users are genuinely interested in sharing their opinions and experiences, and hearing these of other users as well (Light et al., 2018a). These are legitimate concerns as they cast a critical light on the ‘costs of connection’, when museums choose to frame their communication, participation and engagement through online milieus, digital collections, and social media platforms. Such sharing and participative practices are made more complex because of the logic by which social media operates, and how digital communication, digitisation and digitalisation have moved further towards platformisation, which has been understood as ‘the penetration of the infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life’ and as ‘the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around platforms’ (Poell et al., 2019: 5–6; italics in original). This reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around a platform like Instagram, or the tailoring of online museum collections, limits the participative potentials of users to the politics inserted in its design. They therefore offer conditioned participation in communicative terms, where users interact within predefined manoeuvrability which generates explicit content.

This content (user-driven, museum-driven, platform-driven) is further enmeshed in the logics of programmability and datafication (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Many of these processes are inaccessible and adhere to the underlying politics of platforms and the way these politics are shaped by algorithms. This raises concerns regarding what Amoore (2020) refers to as the ethico-political function of algorithms, and their increasing power to shape everyday cultural practices and thereby value-making and the symbolic domain of our lives. Platformisation shapes everyday cultural experiences and this has consequences for citizens engaging with popular platforms as the calculative recommendations, visibility, and circulation of algorithms (Roberge and Seyfert, 2016) makes them powerful instruments in prioritising knowledge; to search, to categorise, visualise, and govern.

So, when established public museums choose to facilitate their communication on commercial social media, they are not only ‘feeding’ the algorithms themselves; they are also pushing their users towards these same algorithms. This evokes concerns regarding free labour (Terranova, 2013), digital labour (Fuchs, 2014), and platform labour (Van Doorn, 2017), which draws attention to the business models of dominant platforms, unpaid and exploited user labour, and the class, gender, and racial inequalities of much platform-mediated work.

When established museums channel their communications via a platform like Instagram, inevitably they are captured in complex media ecology. In order to understand further the effects of such communication flows, one needs to take an approach to digital cultural politics that includes how the politics of platforms condition and steer the content that is generated, how the infrastructural backbone of the platform society chimes with the wider field of digital cultural production and consumption, and how subjects of data are governed and controlled. Such control, however, is not limited only to the media ecology of popular platforms like social media, but also to digital collections which the museums form and make available. Srinivasan et al. (2009) point to how object record creators in museums control, to a certain extent, the structural logics of their digital collections by their choice of metadata schema and in the selection of the term sets and value sets put forward in the collection's interface structure. Furthermore, they claim that these choices are limited by recognised standards that are built into the collection management systems, and therefore, the user agency of museum professionals is always limited by the politics of platforms in question. The governing logics of digital collections and popular platforms are therefore instrumental in providing users with prioritised knowledge, narratives and objects. These acts of prioritisation are political, and now we will further examine the digital cultural politics of the museums in question, starting with the way they unfold as policy.

Digital cultural politics as policy

In their recent communications, such as annual reports, strategies, and reviews, both museums make the Covid-19 crisis a central matter as evidently they have been forced to shut down their daily onsite activities. The onsite lockdown required the museums to think alternatively and so they turned increasingly to digital communication and use of digital media. This is plainly put in the BM director's preface to the British Museum review for 2019–20, which appropriately is titled Reaching Out: ‘We have seen a surge in the number of users of our website, followers to our social media channels and visitors to our online galleries in the past few months’ (British Museum, 2020: 9). The BM launched a new website and a new version of its digital collection, and the review highlights that expanding the reach and quality of its digital material is a high priority. It also reveals a boost in people following the museum on various social media and that it leads the world museum sector in reaching audiences in China through platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. The director's preface in the 2020–21 review also highlights that the museum’s digital channels have flourished and, because of that, the museum managed to stay in close contact with the world during the pandemic. Discursively, the director again emphasises access, audience engagement and quantification in terms of online visits:

The Museum speedily embraced the vision of a 24/7 online museum this year and we saw 3.75 m visits to the Collection Online, an increase of 60%; digital events engaging audiences in excess of 1 m from over 50 countries; and over half a million new social media followers globally. (British Museum, 2021: 7)

In its Strategy: Towards 2020 it says that new technologies allow the Enlightenment ideal to be given a new reality, that its collection can become the private collection of the whole world, and that it ‘should be possible to make the collection accessible, explorable and enjoyable, not just for those who visit, but to everybody with a computer or a mobile device’ (British Museum, n.d.a: 5). This emphasis on accessibility, exploration, and enjoyment associated with digitisation of collections and digital communication is recurrent in the BM's external communications, as demonstrated in the museum's Building Development Framework from 2014: ‘With over 3.5 million of the BM's object records now available via its website, the prospects for continuing to develop ways for people to engage with the research collection are brighter than ever’ (British Museum, 2014: 19). The emphasis on the quantification of objects and the potential of dialogic communication via social media is further stipulated in older BM reviews:

[I]mages transmitted via Twitter and Instagram, and videos on Facebook and YouTube reach vast audiences never before so easily accessed. It is new conversation in which the public and museum staff engage one another, generate debate and share ideas. (British Museum, 2018: 24)

Therefore, discursively, there is no doubt that the museum places itself within the literature on democratic, dialogic, engaging, and participative features of new museology.

Similarly, the NMA promotes discourses that perceive digital technologies as providing opportunities for audience development, interactive experiences, and immediate access to collections and exhibitions:

The Museum encourages active engagement with its stories and collections through digital and social media platforms, and is keen to embrace new forms of audience participation and engagement through its gallery redevelopment program and proposed infrastructure project under its Master Plan. (National Museum of Australia, 2020a: 4)

In the 2021/22 corporate plan, one of the five areas of priority is to excel in innovative digital media, dynamic storytelling and world-class exhibitions, where an expected outcome is to ‘[m]aximise opportunities for digital engagement and embrace innovative approaches to telling the Australian story’ (National Museum of Australia, 2021a: 5). The NMA also delivered several new digital products during the pandemic, such as a new home page, Facebook groups targeted at communities that were directly affected during the crisis, and a continuation of digitising objects and making these available through the ‘Collection Digitisation’ project (National Museum of Australia, 2020b). Furthermore, in the 20–21 Annual Report, it is claimed that the museum has expanded its social media activity and saw a significant increase in reach, engagements and audiences, where Instagram demonstrated the largest growth of all social media platforms (National Museum of Australia, 2021b).

However, while the NMA intensified its efforts within digital communication during the lockdown, this is just a continuation of its older policies. The online content and participation policy from 2010, for instance, is very focused on user-centred design, accessibility, engagement, social media, and user-generated content. However, the NMA is quite aware of its position as a high-profile public museum, and therefore it also considers how these mediated outreach activities relate to trust, diversity, and inclusion: ‘The Museum's approach balances an assessment of risk, prudent moderation and appreciation of inclusion and diversity’ (National Museum of Australia, 2010: 4). This sensibility towards the professional role of the museum as an actor on social media is also present in the museum's social media policy from 2020, where clear guidelines are given in terms of professional and personal use of social media by staff members (National Museum of Australia, 2020c). An interesting feature of the NMA's policies is that while they have rigid rules on how to conduct communication on social media, they provide no further reflection on the wider consequences of these communication flows with regard to algorithmic control, digital labour, and its users’ rights. Instead, just like the BM, they list the platforms which the museum officially operates (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, blogs, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Weibo, and Oasis), and provide a numerical account of how many users they attract.

Common to the two museums is that discursively they tailor their online activities based on the premises of increased engagement and participation, creativity, accessibility, and exploration. They therefore chime with the discourses that describe the move from old to new museology. The next section looks further into how the museums organise their online collection and what kind of user-manoeuvrability they allow for.

Digital cultural politics as collections

During the lockdown, the BM made a new version of its online collection. The volume of available items and the zoom functions are highlighted and, generally, their external communication is marked with concepts such as accessibility, immersion, and exploration. Users are encouraged either to engage with the intuitive search function, or choose from seven collection themes: the Americas, animals, China, death and memory, desire, love and identity, Africa, and Egypt. Apart from that, the collection's frontpage demonstrates eight collection highlights. There are no further explanations given in terms of precisely why these themes were chosen, or why these objects were picked from among the 4.5 million available objects.

When the search function is activated, users can filter their search by all fields, related persons/organisation, related place, object number, and museum number. When I wrote ¹ ‘Joan of Arc’, 173 objects appeared under the theme of person/organisation. The objects are organised in three columns which provide an accessible illustration and metadata. ² I chose to click on an illustration called Watchman, what of the night?, which took me to the page dedicated to this item (British Museum, n.d.b). Here, users can interact with the image by using a zoom function. Users can also learn about copyright requirements and whether they can download and use the image. In this case, permission was not granted. Apart from these functions, each item is equipped with rich metadata in terms of object type, museum number, title, description, producer name, school/style, production place, materials, technique, dimensions, inscriptions, curator's comments, bibliographic references, location, subjects, associated names, acquisition name, department, and registration number. Finally, users are encouraged to provide feedback: ‘We’re always looking to improve our records, so if you have any information about an object or think we’ve made a mistake, please fill in the details below’ (British Museum, n.d.c).

The list of different metadata is quite detailed, as is the information provided within each of them. For instance, in the case of this particular item, users are introduced to the following description: ‘Ellen Terry seen half-length in armour clutching sword, looking to left, her face in three-quarter profile. 1881. Etching, printed on imitation vellum paper’ (British Museum, n.d.b). The curator's comment is quite lengthy and informative, explaining that the picture is painted by Watts and depicts his first wife, Ellen Terry. The comment also accounts for some of its exhibition history, where it was last sold, and why it is sometimes confused with a compositionally similar picture of Joan of Arc. This also explains why a picture that is not of Joan of Arc appears in my search results. In terms of subjects, the picture is tagged as allegory/personification, war, myth/legend, and Bible – which also means that if users search under these terms, the picture is likely to appear from the depths of BM's online archive. The reason why I go through the interface in such detail is that it is here that the visible cultural politics of BM's digital collections manifests itself.

The same is the case with the NMA which has a section on online features, which includes collection interactives, videos, special online projects, and a Google virtual tour. The focus of this article is on the online collection. On the site, users can choose between collection highlights, to learn more about the collection, or search the database for records and images. Users can also browse collection highlights by category, which in the NMA's case are: agriculture, arts, colonial, environment, exploration, gold, household and domestic, Indigenous, industry and work, migration, science and technology, sport, transport, and women. When we enter the collection explorer, we are met with 90,900 items that can be organised by relevance, randomly, the date it was updated, substance (mineral samples, photographs, cartoons, boomerangs, etc.), where (location), who (names), and when (years). Users can search collections, like the Aboriginal Arts Board collection or the Josef Lebovic Gallery collection. Users can also access sets, which are collections curated by the museum's curators and contain objects from other collections. When I interacted with the collection, ³ two sets were specifically put to the fore: ‘Defining moments in Australian history’ and ‘Midawarr/Harvest’. Apart from the two sets, the frontpage of the collection represents six columns of thumbnails, and users can load more of these as they scroll down the site.

I chose to search by relevance and the first item to appear was ‘White tennis dress worn by Evonne Goolagong at Wimbledon in 1971’. When entering that page, users are presented with a picture of the dress, which they can enlarge. When enlarging, users get in total seven pictures of the dress from different angles. There is no zoom function, but the pictures provide some closer details of the dress. Next to the ‘enlarge’ function, there is a ‘reuse image’ function. When activating that with regard to this item, the following message appears: ‘You need permission to reuse this image. Photography, supply and licensing fees may apply’ (National Museum of Australia, n.d.a). Beneath the picture, there is a rather lengthy description which explains the context and shares information about the designer and the player. This is followed by a physical description of the dress and a statement of significance. Finally, the collection provides object information on what (type, collection, dimensions, material, and related links), when (date made, date worn), who (maker, designer, wearer), and where (London and Wimbledon, accessed on my Google maps).

The first set to be promoted is the one on ‘Defining moments in Australian history’, and it is explained in the following terms:

Defining Moments in Australian History examines events, people and places of profound significance to the Australian people. Starting with 100 moments identified by a panel of leading historians and National Museum curators, the list has grown substantially as more Australians nominate the moments they consider important in the nation's history. (National Museum of Australia, n.d.b)

This is quite interesting as it seems to be a combination of expert curation and citizen involvement. It is not clear, however, which 100 moments are identified by the panel and which by citizens. In both cases, the process and the criteria used to choose defining moments are not further explained. Users can access this set by a timeline function that starts 30,000 years ago with the earliest known Australian rock art and ends in July 2019 with the Budj Bim cultural landscape being given World Heritage status. When users enter the individual moments, they are met with detailed and professionally made features on the topic composed of text, pictures, audio recordings, and videos. In terms of direct interaction, users are allowed to ‘clap’ (or ‘like’) and to share via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Messenger, or email.

What this examination of the BM’s and the NMA’s framing of their online collections demonstrates is that in both cases the museums have put extra effort into their online collections under the conditions caused by Covid-19. However, when their digital cultural politics as policy and collections are compared, there seem to be discrepancies in the transition from policy to practice. The emancipative, participative, exploratory, and democratic discourses on a textual level have been replaced by the provision of professionally constructed, rich and instructional information on the museums’ collections, while providing for very little interaction with users. It is therefore difficult to perceive how the dynamic produsers, proams, creative and interactive audience are supposed to interact when the museums do not provide for clearer openings to engage with the collections. From a governmentality point of view, it is still the museums that define and produce the objects of our knowledge, users still follow prescribed paths, and the collections therefore represent a digital version of the microcosmic reconstruction of a totalised order of things and peoples, which Bennett (1995) referred to as emblematic of the power inherent in museum communication.

Hooper-Greenhill (2000) distinguished between the modernist museum and the postmodern museum in an account that resembles the shift from old to new museology. According to the old, modernist version, museums follow the transmission model of communication, where communication is understood as a linear process of information-transfer sent from an authoritative voice to an uninformed receiver. Just like Marstine's idea of the post-museum, Hooper-Greenhill's postmodern version looks into cultural contexts and the importance of interpretation in constructing meaning, thereby allowing for multiple voices, interpretations, and a past that is remembered to privilege different events and narratives. While digital communications theoretically allow for such communications, which are also textually stipulated in the digital cultural politics of the museums, their collections are all the same very clear in their organisation of events, narratives, and works that are organised and pushed to the fore by professional curators. With regard to the two museums, the engaging, participative features are very much outsourced to commercial social media platforms, and the next section dives further into their communication on Instagram.

Digital cultural politics as a platform

The BM’s Instagram profile has 2373 posts and 2 million followers. ⁴ The corresponding numbers for the NMA are 1552 posts and 25,500 followers. I focus on the posts, the interactions, comments, and symbolic representations these generated between the museums and their users. This means that I leave out features such as IGTV, ‘my story’, and reels. During the time of inspection, the BM shared over 600 posts. When these are inspected further, a pattern emerged. The year 2020 was of course exceptional in terms of the Covid-19 crisis, and a post from 15 December exemplifies this quite well. It shows a picture of the museum's renowned Great Court empty of people, accompanied by the following text: ‘The museum has now closed in accordance with government advice as London moves into Tier 3 […] The Museum remains open and accessible online and we’ll continue to share the collection, research and programmes during this time’ (British Museum, n.d.d). The post received over 10,000 likes and 68 comments. What is interesting about this post is that it is informative, it channels practical information on the current situation, and pushes further communication to the museum's online spaces. Other popular themes which the museum constitutes in its communication on Instagram are: displaying museum objects, interiors from the museum, products from the museum store, and museum guests enjoying the museum's onsite facilities. The BM, therefore, uses the affordances of Instagram strategically to advocate for onsite exhibitions and activities, to showcase items from its collection, and introduce users to the museum store. Occasionally, the BM addresses its guests with questions and showcases items in one post An example of this is a post that contains pictures by Utagawa Hiroshige illustrating the winter countryside around Japan:

What's the weather like near you? These charming snowy scenes were made by Japanese printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige in the mid 1800s, beautifully illustrating the winter countryside around Japan Hiroshige started producing landscape prints in the early 1830s and continued to create views of famous locations in Japan throughout his career, depicting the topography of the country and the people who lived there in great detail. Pick out a perfect print in our online shop – we have wonderful woodblock prints like these. Link in bio. (British Museum, n.d.d)

The post further provides information about the four pictures, followed by a row of hashtags. Another example of such communication is a post that pictures the museum's Enlightenment Gallery and starts with a question that asks if users knew that the gallery is the oldest space in the museum, followed by factual information about the gallery, and a row of hashtags. In both cases, users provide numerous likes and comments, where they directly engage with the questions posed by museum professionals.

The following post demonstrates communication where users are encouraged to do some shopping:

Our #BlackFriday sale ends today! Head to the link in our bio for 20% off when you spend £30 or more. Discover homeware, jewellery, gifts and games inspired by the collection. Every purchase supports the Museum, and we ship internationally – use code BF20 at the checkout. Offer ends at midnight GMT tonight! (British Museum, n.d.d)

The next example demonstrates how the BM makes use of Instagram's facilities to share pictures taken by guests:

We love seeing all your pictures of the Museum, and the Great Court is certainly a firm favourite with all our visiting photographers To mark the 20th anniversary of its opening, we’re sharing a couple of cracking snaps from recent months taken by @stevelws and @donnaesth. Have you taken any pictures of the space? We’d love to see them – tag us in your photos Head to the link in our bio to find out everything you ever wanted to know about the Great Court. You can book tickets for a visit at britishmuseum.org/visit. (British Museum, n.d.d)

Finally, the latest post that the BM posted on Instagram during the time of inspection was dedicated to the theme of Halloween and depicted a selection of spooky prints and drawings from the collection. This is also a recurrent theme on the museum's Instagram profile, as many of the posts are further linked to events, celebrations and traditions taking place in everyday life.

What these examples demonstrate is that museum professionals are skilled in using the functionalities of Instagram to reach out to users to inform, showcase the collection, to educate and provide information about items, to make use of the museum's guests’ pictures, to encourage users to visit the museum shop, and to make the museum relevant to various things taking place in society at large. Generally, users engage actively in the comments, but interestingly, the museum professionals very rarely reply or engage in these conversations. Users, however, are quite vibrant. Much of the communication comes in the form of emojis and exclamations, the sharing of memories of their museum visits, but also in the asking of questions, and even criticising the museum's policy and encouraging it to return objects to their original contexts. The museum therefore does not take advantage of the dialogical potential which Instagram affordances facilities, but rather keeps a clear communicative distance between themselves and users. It is thus safe to say that it controls and governs communication flow and knowledge production tightly.

This is also the case when the same analytical strategy is applied to the NMA's Instagram profile. A post from 16 December 2020 depicts a picture of a demonstration with the following text:

In December 1976 the federal parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act. It was the first legislation in Australia that enabled Indigenous people to claim land rights for country where traditional ownership could be proven. Learn more about this defining moment via the link in our bio. (National Museum of Australia, n.d.c)

This post is preceded by a post that shows accessories from the museum shop:

Shop Australian made and designed gifts this festive season at the Museum Shop. Discover a wide range of designer homewares, gifts, jewellery, books, children's toys and much more, both in-store and online. With free parking on weekends and a great cafe, enjoy a stress-free experience at the Museum Shop. The Museum Shop is open 9am–5pm (closed Christmas Day): shop.nma.gov.au or @the_museumshop (National Museum of Australia, n.d.c)

The most recent post at the time of inspection shows pictures of the 1866 Melbourne Cup, accompanied by an informative text about the cup, the trophy, and where to locate and learn more about it.

The communication conducted by museum professionals at NMA is similar to that of the BM, both in terms of themes, and in the general faming of the communication. The NMA produces fewer posts and user engagement is also less, which goes hand in hand with the number of followers. However, what is common to both museums is the absence of museum professionals entering into dialogue in response to users’ comments. Again, the NMA's presence on Instagram is therefore carefully curated by professionals, and is informative, interesting, and educational, but does not enter dialogue with users.

Conclusion

In the same way as many other large-scale, internationally acclaimed museums, the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia are putting increasing emphasis on digitisation, their use of digital media, and digital collections. Digital communication and the museums’ adaptation of digital media have provided means to realise the theoretical discourses associated with new museology, and thereby serve – ideally to translate the museums’ policies into practice. However, just as new museology has developed during the past 30 years, so have patterns of digital communication, their infrastructures, governing principles, and the business models of dominant platforms. This article has focused on how two renowned, large-scale museums have grappled with opportunities and challenges concomitant to digital museum communication. How do these museums tailor their digital cultural politics and how can the path from policy to practice be traced through further inspection of their digital collections and presence on social media platforms? The approach taken in this article has therefore been to inspect how the museums frame their digital cultural politics as policy; as digital collections; and as platform communication.

Results indicate that there is disconnect between how the museums choose to discursively represent their visions on digital communication and platform use, and the actuality of their current digital collections and use of Instagram. Discursively, the governing principles are dialogic, democratic, creative, experimental, and user-centric. In practice, however, both museums are still anchored in governing principles of control. Their arrangement of digital collections and use of Instagram can be described as modernist museum communication, where learned and skilled museum professionals communicate and disseminate knowledge from experts to lay people. These are professional communications in the sense that knowledge is put forward in an informative, clear, and educational manner. Therefore, digital communications have provided them with new channels to reach out and to make them potentially more relevant amongst new demographic groups of the population.

However, they do not provide for dialogic communication where users can see concrete results of their user-generated content with regard to a shift in power dynamics between museum professionals and museum guests. Users are therefore staged in a specific manner which confirms the museums’ dominant positions within the field of cultural production. This is not strange or surprising, however, as this has always been a major characteristic of museum communication. What is surprising, though, is the discrepancies between their policies and their actual practice with regard to the governing principles of their online collection and use of social media. Discourses of engagement, participation and co-creation are based on dynamic, often visible, interactions, which can be measured in concrete actions. This is so in terms of much of the writing that characterises new museology, and this certainly is the case in how the two museums choose to put forward their digital cultural politics as policy. However, the tailoring of the museums’ digital collections does not provide for functionalities which encourage such dynamic participation, and when the museum professionals communicate on platforms that facilitate such interactions, such as Instagram, they seldom engage in dialogical communication with users. While these communicative acts by museum professionals certainly resemble what Crawford (2009) refers to as listening practices, they still relate awkwardly to the engaging, participative, innovative, explorative and creative weight that is discursively detectable in their policies. Seen from this perspective, the two museums are successful in initiating communications on Instagram and in the way that they design the online collections. However, it is the disconnect between their cultural politics as policy, and their cultural politics as collection and platforms that causes discrepancies between policy and practice.

Lastly, what is both surprising and problematic is the absence of detailed information regarding the governing principles of content production on social media, and how museum users are automatically pushed towards the algorithmic governmentality inscribed in social media's business models. By focusing only on the promising outreach potential of commercial social media communication and arrangement of their online collections, the museums turn a blind eye to how this potentially affects their users as data subjects in the age of platform giants.