Something's shifting - audience, age and attraction, or "I'd like to try one of those phones"

The Museums and the Web papers are copy edited by the retired chair of a college English department (who also happens to be my mother). Her reaction to what she reads is always a bellweather to me, for she's pretty representative of one group of museum goers (and Web site users): educated, comfortably well-off, well-traveled, retired but active. She's often mentioned that she's gone off into a content-rich site mentioned in one of the papers and spent awhile reading or working through an on-line exhbition.

But this is the first time that she's shown more than an academic interest in the more interactive projects. Her sense of 'why would anyone want to do that' has shifted, to the point of volunteering that she'd "like to try one of those phones". This from a person who shares an inherited dislike of the telephone generally.

The phone in question was being used by groups of students in a museum setting to record content and construct their own narratives. Rather than thinking about the Web site as a reference work, our editor had repositioned it and herself. The museum was no-longer a remote information resource. The technology had become an enabler in the museum space, that made it possible for her to record the story that interested her. The phone was a primitive approximation of Professor Dumbledore's "rememberall" – important at a time when all of our memories are stressed by too many stimuli.

There's a theme running through the MW2007 papers, about enabling access to museums using the technology of choice. What's intriging is that those choices may not be as generationally bound as we are thinking. The phone / i-Pod / audio tour continuum might soon be perturbed. It doesn't seem to take very long for a medium to become 'conventional'.

/jt