Why Intel’s Museum of Me isn’t mine at all
There’s an engaging little application sponsored by Intel making the rounds this week, inviting Facebook users to create The Museum of Me. My Wall is blowing up with links to various friends’ virtual galleries, each showing a selection of photographs, videos, and other content uploaded to their respective Facebook pages. The premise, I presume, is that if a user has voluntarily added content to his or her Facebook page, it must be significant and therefore worthy of inclusion in a retrospective of his or her life. The application aggregates all of the available media and displays the content as objects of significance in galleries, set to music, complete with visitors. The “significance” is gleaned from stats-data: who users message/poke the most, the words that appear most frequently on a user’s wall, etc. As an application, it’s a great piece of coding and use of technology; but is my Museum of Me, well, mine? I’m not sure.
Collecting is one of humanity’s shared behaviours. We all collect stuff that means something to each of us, another man’s trash is another man’s treasure, etc. Social media has, for the past few years, allowed people to collect more and share it more readily. But despite frequent use, Facebook isn’t exactly the place where I store my most precious things; though I post some photos I want others to see, articles I find relevant, and many many updates about my life, I still keep the most personal and private and tangible aspects of my life off of my Wall.
Therein lies the problem with the Museum of Me: museums tell stories through objects, aiming to give a complete picture while enlightening viewers through interpretation of those objects. The best museums bring disparate pieces of the puzzle together and make the connections not readily visible to the naked eye; showing me the “Likes” I liked that others also “Liked” isn’t interpretation, it’s just mapping correlations. Curation is the compelling undercurrent of the museum experience, leading the display, and without it an exhibit is just a jumble of unrelated stuff. So my Museum of Me failed me because it didn’t just tell my story, it didn’t tell any story at all.
The interesting thing about Museum of Me, though, is how it’s presented Intel to me. By creating this nifty piece of software, it has reminded me of just how powerful their processing abilities truly are. But conversely, it’s also reminded me that processing information – just processing, no content curation – is all they do. If Intel is looking to change the way I think about them, they need to do a little bit more than remind me of my stuff.
(Danielle Zezulinski)
