Hello Douglas Worts Your note from 8/16 was challenging. I've been thinking about it a bit since then and have a couple of thoughts. Whenever a discussion of substance seems to turn on a particular technology, my instinct is to try to drop that technology from the discourse and see if things still make sense. What you addressed in your letter (that was of most interest to me) was the "authoritarian paradigm" under which museums (not unlike most other educational institutions) assume their role. How this hierarchy expresses itself is far from limited to high tech devices. Assuming control over the meaning of objects is the same whether they are digitized or in real time. I find the current discussion under the title of "Mummies and Micro-climates" to be telling in this regard. Who controls the process of constructing meaning? It was, for me, something of a religious experience to read Barthes' "The Death of the Author" a few years ago. My guess is that "author" is a rather broad term, and we can easily substitute museum in there. If we can allow visitors/users the space to create their own meaning from the experience without the "appropriate" or "correct" interpretation breathing down their necks, we might be moving in the right direction. Of course the risks are there. Perpetuating stereotypes, misinformation, etc.,etc.,etc. Who said it would be easy? I don't see that the medium makes that much difference in dealing with the underlying issues. Clearly I'm deciding what the underlying issues are, don't we all? Aaron Goldblatt Please Touch Museum [log in to unmask]