I'm now roughly halfway through my internship with exactly two weeks to go for the credit portion. The internship itself should go into late August, hopefully with plenty of time to research all of the subjects I set out to cover at the start, and to create original social-media post content concerning the subjects as well as some related artworks.
I've learned quite a bit, one thing I've for certain realized is not to mess with Assyriologists, Egyptologists, or even Archaeologists. If I stick to what I know, they get some of the diversity they need and I get to take more of an independent-study track (I'm bringing a lot of interest in far eastern philosophy, world religions and art history, mostly). I still get feedback on my posts as well as whatever support I require, and they handle all of the problems inherent in internet finds where conspiracy theories and pseudo-science tend to dominate the algorithms.
That's one thing I particularly love about this internship. As I was going into it, there was so much I was realizing needed to be changed in our current museum culture and in our society at large. Especially with the Black Lives Matter protests, and the current pandemic, everyone, including our institutions, now have no other choice than to look inward and realize how oppressive and racist the whole structure is. The way things operated in the past just wasn't sustainable, and it requires a necessary death and rebirth. I was afraid we would be forced to ignore current events in favor of propping up old stories and ideals, but at every Zoom meeting I've had my voiced concerns reciprocated by Pinar, the social media intern team director.
I experienced a similar conundrum on a personal level when I was at the monastery. I began to think, "what good am I doing the world locked up in an old hermitage in the mountains? Don't I need to go out and affect change in order to evolve?" That dichotomy sparked a lot of internal dialogue for me, and to see it on a global scale (and this harkens back to the Empathy book we read last Spring), leads me to believe we really are in the middle of a new Axial Age.
This was a great post, Devin, and made me wish we were in class so I could ask you a bunch of follow-up questions. Before I forget, is there a link you can share to where you are creating your posts for your internship? I would love to read them!
ReplyDeleteI am also dying to know what happens if you mess with Assyriologists, Egyptologists, or Archaeologists. I knew about not scraping with archaeologists (they are a hardy bunch!).
It is awesome that you are thinking about how museums need to change. I've always been interested in the cognitive dissonance that most museum workers seem to have to be able to balance our love of museums with the awareness that they are deeply flawed institutions. How do most museum people make sense of that dichotomy? I look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on this in our Fall Museum Studies class!
Haha, I will try to find a way to collect my posts and show them to you, otherwise when the social media campaign starts I can point out ones I've worked on. Also, a lot of what I do is give input on website design and how to operate on social media platforms. Most of the work I've done, however, falls under the Research and Creative Writing job descriptions.
DeleteMostly what I meant about not 'messing with them' was that they are a very knowledgeable bunch. One of the conversations I found myself in was how to casually take down Ancient Aliens and ancient astronaut theory in one of my posts due to its inherent racism. Anyhow, I have one more post and a final paper to draft so I'll try to include some more of these points there.