The screen culture is forced upon by perception goals. I cringe when I look at large screens all over my office, which are there only to create a perception, with zero information or usefulness. Sort of jewellery for an establishment. A cheap way to look modern. But it consumes power and creates global warming for nothing.

It happens when you give a contract to someone to modernize the place. They throw a bunch of screens and meaningless sculptures (aka artwork), wierd-shaped structures, with random text in large font, around and fulfill the metrics for modern-ness. They just deliver on their customer's wish to see things to be quite different from earlier state. How that difference makes sense, doesn't matter. Delivery done, transaction completed.

We are chasing change. Change is seen as accomplishment. Big bosses keep shuffling their org very often. Not really to optimize, but to show that they did something, and to show their power. Weirdness also qualifies as a good thing, because it is a change. No wonder TV ads and content promote as much weirdness as allowed.

I had similar experiences seeing WWII artifacts and museums in Romania, Hungary, London, Brussels, and Berlin.

In the first 4 I had the most immersive experiences seeing memorabilia and artifacts from the Allies and Axis. Things like uniforms, cars, letters, tanks, jets, war trophies, and so on.

Everything was highly curated, and from the outside, the infrastructure was not so expensive to run. In terms of quality, the military museums of Romania, London, and Brussels are great.

Those places are to feel and have immersion.

In Berlin, there are only a few screens, but they have only some sort of "small billboards" in a version in German and some rough translation to English. Most of the time it is a picture of someone and some legend only.

However in Berlin and Munich, they have something, in my opinion, better than museums that we call as Documentation Centers. In Berlin there is the _Das Dokumentationszentrum Topographie des Terrors_ (Topography of Terrors), and for me the best documentation center is in Munich, called _NS-Dokumentationszentrum München_, which gets into the roots of the regime via the whole buildupand actual documents from leadership, political party meeting minutes, political discussions, and so on.

I get the articles point. I too feel as though things should be more actual hands on, less flash-game-y.

But one kinda-counterpoint was my experience in Amsterdam at Micropia [0]. Museum containing many small things including fungi, bacteria, ants etc etc.

Some stuff you didn't want to actually touch with hands really anyway...

Yes they had magnifying glasses but many exhibits were simply using the screen to show the image from a microscope. And they let you control the microscope to focus, zoom in and out, etc.

Left an impression on me as being a museum that did digital right.

[0]https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia

> I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses. Here’s the sculpture — the actual piece of stone, two thousand years old, Greek sculptor unknown — now go ahead and form your impressions.

When I'm in a museum with ancient sculptures, ironically, I don't want to see them as-is. Instead, I want to walk into a room that attempts to emulate how the sculptures looked in the context that they were originally displayed in, often with original paint that's been lost over the millennia since they were made.

Even cooler would be a projector that could "turn on and off" what the sculpture looked with original paint and possibly other decorations that have long since decayed.

I'll take this opportunity to suggest some great places I've found.

The Corning Glass Museum is free (!!) and has both great art and great science, several interactive exhibits, and lots of information about glass and its history and application.

Interactive art exhibits like Otherworld! (and Meowwolf maybe? I have not been to it, but I hear it is a similar idea) It has a whole storyline, various rooms with different 'exhibits'. Classic physical art, puppets, electronics, a space invaders arcade game that is broken but then you realize you can climb under the arcade game and through a tunnel into a room where you can play _for real_ while space invaders drop from the ceiling, etc.

There are a lot of these neat things around.

I totally agree with the post. The definition of a museum is "an institution dedicated to displaying or preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects", according to Wikipedia. Most of the time I do not see anything significant on these screens in museums, since equivalent content can be easily reached on any phone. Real, relevant objects are much harder to find and find a way to create interest around them. But that is exactly what makes a museum a good museum, not the screen.

Same thing at Science World, luckily they have a lot of tangible artifacts, but a ton of computers/displays. Last time I went (<6mo ago) a bunch of displays/stations in the most-hyped exhibit were non-functional due to hardware faults. :\

It's rampant in art museums as well.

It costs approximately $2,000 to frame a 36" piece of art to museum standards. A similarly sized LCD screen, on the other hand...

Art wasn't supposed to be a "by the square foot" kind of thing yet here we are.

Before reading the article, I was going to talk about my very disappointing visit to the Franklin Institute a few months ago. Then I read the article and discovered that it's about the disappointment of visiting the Franklin Institute. My strongest impression of that museum is that it mostly consists of corporate sponsorship displays and a few neglected lessons in how things actually work.

I did enjoy walking around the enormous steam loco in the basement. That one room, where they seem to have stuffed all the old 'museum' stuff was the highlight of my visit.

The best science museum I've been to in years is in Glasgow. Walking across the I-beam compared to the sheet (or was it a bar?) of steel actually taught my kids something.

Seeing his description about the early visits when he was a child reminded me of the City Museum in St Louis.

Kid sized interactive art museum. A place I wish were around when I was grade school age.