“We hope you share your thoughts with us:” the illusion of engagement in museum blogging

The advent of museum blogs has contributed to making the process through which these institutions create, handle, and exchange knowledge more transparent. However, museums do not adequately capitalize on the two-way dialogic potential promised by social media but continue to employ blogs in more-or-less the same way they have used traditional media, disseminating institutional messages and broadcasting general information about the museum. In the present study, two representative cases are investigated: the J. Paul Getty Museum blog, characterized by full moderation, and the Victoria and Albert Museum blog, partially moderated. Selected blog entries and related comment threads are analyzed adopting a discourse-analytical perspective. Specific focus is placed on the rhetorical organization of communication and on the lexical and interpersonal features deployed by museums to discursively 'situate' themselves towards their audiences, with a view to identify linguistic evidence of openness or foreclosure. The level of engagement and dialogic interaction obtained across each platform is also evaluated in light of the presence of comments and their moderation. The outcomes of the analysis are eventually put in relation to the issues of trust, authority, and institutional control. The analysis confirms that museums still prefer to contain knowledge within their walls in order to maintain their legitimacy, remaining entrenched in unidirectional modes of communication.