Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the fact that part of what is contributing to our grade is our ability to people watch. The next step is getting paid for this sort of thing. Can anyone help me with that?

I spent my first fifteen minutes at the video display playing the same ten-minute video, “Life in the Balance,” on a loop. The video shows all of the majesties of nature for the first third, what human beings are doing to destroy that in the second third, and possible ways we can fix the problems presented in the third…uh, third. I started my watching officially at 11:30, after I’d already been standing there for around ten minutes watching the video through and figuring this display would be easier than any other in the hall because no one used it. A few minutes later a family of four showed up to stare at the screen for about forty seconds with incredibly bad timing because the children very much did not like bees and loudly made it known. (Then a family of three passed by and one of the children knocked into me with his shoulder, making me conclude children just don’t know how to walk.) Out of the 17 people that “interacted” (read: had even a solitary glance at it) with the display, that family of four actually stayed longer than most, who walked by with a solitary glance at the screen or paused in front of it for a few moments before continuing. Other long contenders were a young adult that stayed for three minutes to watch the solutions portion of the video then leaving at the end (the danger of video loops), and a single mother with her child who stayed for about four minutes, and only for one of those minutes did the child actually sit down (they left during the bit where the human impact on the world started). The female half of an elderly couple mad an apt comment during her momentary stay: “I don’t like to look.” Found poetry, maybe.

The second display I stayed at was the Resource Center, a through-way in the room that is a load of information presented all at once with numerous video loops and large infographic displays on pretty much everything to do with biodiversity and environmental degradation. Though many more people gave the section a glance, a selective few gave it any more than that: of the 37 people I counted that came through the display (plus 2 entire school classes, probably around 50 or 60 students, who didn’t pause except for the teacher to yell at them to keep hands held with their walking buddy), only a dozen stayed for any amount of time to read anything, and half of those were students forced to be there for an assignment (including Katie and company!). Of people not forced to be there, about four stayed for longer than a minute, though one notable person went through and read every display during the fifteen minutes I was there. Another read about half of them and just stood in front of the others texting. He gets a pale yellow star for trying. Also notable was an old man that walked through with his head down, mumbling to himself, then pausing at the population increase display and shouting things like “Yeah, that’s something.” He was my favorite. I named him Jim.

Though both displays did present a wealth of information (the resource center moreso, obviously), I think a lot of the problems with both of them came down to interactivity and marketing. The textual displays in the resource center got the most attention, second to the bigger-screened video displays lining the wall, whereas the smaller video displays were only used by students—I might guess that this is because everyone can read at whatever pace they want, but videos force the information unto us usually in time slower than we find necessary. The Life in the Balance display got nearly no attention at all­—I think the problem here is that no one wants to be forced through a video. I think that in the resource center this could be fixed by offering the smaller displays as interactive—touch screens, the ability to either watch the video or read a transcript for those that want the information they want to get from it quickly. For Life in the Balance, I’m not wholly sure there’s any fix to make people want to sit for ten minutes in a loud room to watch anything, but an offer of what the hell it is they’re watching might be nice—just a small plaque giving an overview might do the trick. The problem presented to museums, I think, is not in educating the public—there’s a huge amount of educative opportunity available at the museum—but educated people in a way that is engaging and entertaining, to educate those who aren’t expressly there to be educated but rather for an afternoon out. What the information needs is a marketing team. Which is the most depressing thing in the world, but, yaknow, blahblah Roland Barthes semiotics of consumerism blahblah millenials need to feel engaged and engaged in a way that seems both sincere and at their pace because we’ve been force-fed for so long blahblah theoritician statement blahblah Lonesome George was cool.