| The Participatory Museum is a new idea recently proposed by Nina Simon,a museum professional from America,and it is defined as "a place where visitors can create,share,and connect with each other around content".The participatory museum theory has been explained in detail on the book under the same title by Simon.This paper aims at explore the participatory museum theory in depth and in what context can it be applied into practice.To begin with,the paper concisely reviews the participatory museum theory,in particular,the four practical models design by Simon and makes comparison and contrast with those participatory models designed by other professionals.Furthermore,the paper summarizes museological literatures involved with participation into four categories-society/community,ethics,education and marketing to explore the internal development of participatory museum theory.For the second part of this paper,it elaborates the key influences by the participatory culture,Web 2.0 and the sorting of online users according to their behavior by the Forrester Research among the Internet communication studies field on Simon's participatory museum.To exactly define the participatory museum,the paper further make detailed comparison and contrast with other hot-debated concepts and approaches like community museum/eco-museum,interaction/interactivity and computer-based/online platform.Finally,the paper illustrates the conditions of realizing the participatory museum theory from two perspectives-internally,museums should be equipped with open-minded institutional culture and high-qualified frontline staff members;externally,it relies on the middle class among the general public which has a certain disposable income and time to support their participation into museums and a relatively mature civil society.Besides,this paper makes preliminary analysis on the feasibility and future development of the participatory museum theory in China as reference for any further research. |
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