Having Something to Say That Matters

I talk about social media a lot – I’m a huge fan of it. I blog, I tweet, I Facebook, I Google +; Basically, I live on the Internet and I love to talk about it. Last week, I mentioned social media in my post about knowledge of ourselves, and that wasn’t the first time that social media has popped up on my radar screen here at Interpreting the Civil War. Contrary to what many of my co-workers and friends think, I’m not Mr. Social Media. I mean, I enjoy interacting and using social media (as does the rest of the world) but I’m not anywhere near the expert, social media native, or early adopter that many of my co-workers and colleagues think I am. I actually got into the whole social media thing pretty late – for instance, I never had a Myspace account (ha!) and I only really started tweeting in November of 2010, four whole years after Twitter told the world by storm.

When you boil it down, what really makes me such a fan of social media is what it represents – a paradigm shift. Social media is to me the single greatest illustrator of the age we live in – one of information. Social media itself is a paradigm shifter and game changer. It represents the information age so well, one in which audiences are sharing information with each other all over the world, craving interaction. And I absolutely love it when I see historic sites, National Park Service sites, and other museums join in, and take part in the social media scene. It represents that those organizations want to be a part of what social media is all about: interacting with pop culture and society, continually co-creating content collaboratively with many different groups, ideas, and influences, fostering conversations, and trying to remain relevant in people’s lives by interacting and meeting them where they are. Adopting social media as part of your interpretive offerings means a great deal to me and says something about your historic site and its goals and management.

However great the feeling is when I discover a new historic site on Facebook, or follow another museum’s twitter feed, that feeling is only temporary, as reality soon sets in – most historic sites just don’t get it. Having a twitter feed doesn’t make one automatically relevant. And you’re not getting any street cred from me just because you set up a Facebook page for your site. Just because you engage in social media, don’t expect to have the youth population (yeah, that one demographic you’re always trying to reach but never quite can) to just suddenly come knocking on your door. Just because your site uses social media doesn’t automatically make you “cool.” Social media and the Internet are bigger than you. Internet culture is something completely different than anything you’ve ever seen before. Showing up is one thing, but participating in that culture is something completely different.

When you engage in social media, follow the already establish rules of the Internet and social media. If you don’t know them, just watch. Listen. Find out. Remember, Goggle is your friend. So please don’t automatically connect your Facebook account to your Twitter handle. No one wants to click through Twitter to go to Facebook. It’s OK to use social media grammar on social media sites too. And most importantly, have something to say that matters.

Social media is a conversation with the world. Having something meaningful to say is probably the single most important thing to remember when using social media. What do you want to tell the world about? What do you want to share with the world? What do you want to talk about? Think big, not small. Is driving people to your outdated website, spamming them about the weather at your actual site, or tweeting random inspirational quotes that have nothing to do with your site really your best foot forward when it comes to social media? Is that really what you want to use this awesome new tool for?

Why not try to pare down a meaning of your site into less than 140 characters like Twitter user Josh Hoover did:

Or, connect your site to a current event (also in 140 characters) as did Fort McHenry during Hurricane Irene:

Why not post a historic photo to generate discussion, such as Glacier National Park:

Bottom line, each one of these posts had something to say. It was not just information that could be found elsewhere. These posts were part of a conversation and said something meaningful. When it comes to social media, that should be your number one priority.

History not Hokum: Learning from Specters

There was a good, provocative question asked by Aaron Urbanski on my post last week:

What are we to make of those who literally try to raise the dead at our nation's historical locations? Can ghost tours ever be a successful medium (pun intended) for interpretation?

If there's one thing I love more than anything else in this world, it's a good, provocative question to chew. I've been mulling it over for the past few days and a few keen points keep bubbling to the surface.

Remember, this spook party is not
recommended for kids under 12 / LOC

The concept of studying ghost tours and why they are so effective was introduced to me this past fall during the Pennsylvania Historical Association annual conference in Johnstown. The keynote address was given by newly christened Gettysburgian Peter Carmichael on relevance at Civil War sites. I don't agree with everything Peter mentioned, and I think we can look even broader for relevance than the techniques of modern analogy that are his (admittedly effective) workhorse, but he raised a good point about ghost tours that has been haunting me since.

Why are they so effective? Gettysburg is swarmed with ghost tours. On a warm summer evening, walking down to my favorite ice cream shop in the battle-period home where a seminary student sheltered in the basement while battle raged around his ears, I find myself again and again shoved either into oncoming traffic or into a brick wall by throngs of visitors hunting 'ghosts.' They follow a Gettysburg College theater major or a local teenager looking to pick up a few extra bucks wearing old-timey looking clothes and carrying the ubiquitous lantern through Gettysburg's brightly lit streets. The newest of these phoney offerings arms visitors as ghost hunters with cheap thermometers and 'laser nets' (dime-store laser pointers with a weird looking lens), the tools that will purportedly help them find ghosts.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

-A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I used to mess with ghost tours when I was a student at the college. I lived in Stevens Hall, my window facing out on Carlisle Street. There is a beautiful old sitting room a the front of the building. I would read draped across the couch there nightly.

When a tour was outside and flashbulbs drenched the windows, I would drop to the deck and crawl to the light switch. Flicking it on and off a few times, I would leave it off. Flashbulbs would go off outside incessantly. The poor tour guide would begin to talk louder and more angrily, telling the bogus tale of the 'blue boy.' It was childish, I admit. But I howled with laughter at what I was sure at the time was the best example of Barnum's old adage about the birthrate of suckers.

I'm not so sure now. Those people wanted something they weren't getting out on the battlefield. The hokum of a spirit world offers these visitors something they aren't feeling anywhere else in town: the real. They want to dialogue with the dead, meet them, shake their hand.

When you wander around Gettysburg today, it's so impossible to imagine that place nearly 150 years ago. Flickering gas streetlamps have been supplanted by halogen bulbs. Neon beer signs pour out on a square that once hosted thousands of onlookers, partying for lack of beds and hanging on the words of men like Lincoln and Seward as they addressed the crowd from their doorstep or window. Cars streak down the pavement where ambulances were overtaken and flipped by crowds of men running pell-mell toward a hill with a cemetery on it, fearing for their lives.

The Civil War is not manifest in Gettysburg. Nor should we strive to make it so. I like the bars, shops and restaurants that dot the streets of my town. I like being able to drive down the street to head to the movies or get groceries. I like being able to walk through town on warm summer evening and not worry about being mugged in the gaslight on the way for ice cream. And I'm pretty sure that visitors like these things too.

To hold hands with the dead, to feel
the real presence of the past. / PD LOC

What the ghost tours provide through stories and the tantalizing offer of meeting an incorporeal actor in the famed battle is a taste of the real. Who wouldn't salivate at the opportunity to sit down with the ghost of Lincoln or Reynolds or Henry Hunt and simply ask, "So what was it like way back then?"

How can we learn what our visitors want from our special places by studying their penchant to go on ghost tours in the evening hours? Are they looking for the possibility of feeling the real, of meeting the past? Is that why they pay good money to carry around hokey versions of Ray Stantz' PKE Meter made from duct tape and some fishing wire? Is there something exciting about the prospect of meeting the past?

And most importantly, can we replicate this feeling through interpretation, telling stories of things that actually happened and not simply stories dreamed up by an overactive imagination? How can we help visitors find the real without resorting to to hokum?

Knowledge of Ourselves

Pay no attention to the man behind the Facebook
CC Flickr user B Rosen

As more and more museums and historic sites have entered the social media fray, I’d guarantee that there have been many accompanying conversations among staff on how best to use those newly created “official” Twitter handles, Facebook pages, and Flickr profiles. Much of the discussions though, I’d wager, have revolved around the social aspects of those aforementioned sites, such as what and when to post, and how exactly to say what you want to say. What tone, figures of speech, and language conventions should historic sites use when engaging in social media? It’s a perplexing question, one with a wide range of answers. Should historic sites try to maintain that standard formal and professional tone that we’ve come to know, love, and expect in other official media productions such as brochures and waysides? Or, should historic sites adopt the conventions of the medium – using abbreviations, all capitals (not always a bad idea), and language native to that particular social media platform? Wherever you fall in that debate, (hint: be yourself - show that there is a man behind the curtain) the debate itself raises an even bigger question that revolves around the distinctly social aspect of those interactions: Where does the actual interpreter fit in? Should his/her voice and experience ever be present?

At its core, social media forces historic sites to think about audience, tone, and voice in new ways. How can a historic site remain professional yet still interact in these new venues, and more importantly, what does this mean for the historic site as a whole? Fundamentally, social media brings an issue front and center we have ignored far too long – that interpreters are part of the site and the site’s interpretation. Simply put, we’re part of the story. Interpreters play a critical role not only in interpreting the site’s story, but also in the story itself. What do we do about this predicament? Do we, like generations of interpreters before us, ignore it, brush it off, and force visitors fixated with us back to the site’s story and the official tone of the agency we represent? Or do we embrace ourselves, and weave it in within our interpretation of the story - the whole story?

We must embrace it. When presenting programs, we can’t be afraid of offering our own experiences, emotions, and feelings when we present and talk about our historic sites. We don’t always speak for the agency. Sometimes we speak for ourselves. No doubt, we have to be professional about whatever we say, clearly signaling that we are speaking from our own distinct points of view, which are exclusively ours and not those of our employers. But, we cannot suppress our own experiences. We have to use them or realize that we already do, and make an acknowledgement of that fact. If we preach and say we value multiple perspectives and radical empathy, we have to value our own experience and perspective as well. We can no longer hide who we are when we give interpretive programs.

 Perhaps the best way to acknowledge ourselves as part of the story is to change that ever present equation that all good interpreters know: (KR + KA) x AT = IO, where KR = knowledge of resource, KA = knowledge of audience, AT = appropriate techniques, and IO = interpretive opportunity. In rethinking this model, I think KR should not only reflect our knowledge of the physical site, but ourselves as well. To reflect this, how about KR&O = knowledge of resource and ourselves? So the new equation would look like this:

(KR&O + KA) x AT = IO

Every interpreter has his own style, method of presenting, and way about doing interpretation. We have to add our own experiences to that list as well, for that more than anything else, has the ability to influence our programs in either a positive or negative way. Before we can successfully craft good interpretation, we must have knowledge of ourselves. We must be professionally personal, willing to hold little of ourselves back when discussing the universal issues of race, conflict, war, gender, and the other aspects of humanity that our sites often represent. We are human, after all.

Practical Necromancy: Raising the Dead for Fun & Profit

Spooky (and very fake)!
PD / UK Nat'l. Media Museum

Our profession is a unique and somewhat strange one. We are paid, fundamentally, to give voice to the voiceless. History is taking the people of the past and breathing into their lungs, letting them speak and act again even though they are long dead.

If I ever write a book about historical interpretation, the title Practical Necromancy: Raising the Dead for Fun & Profit is tops on my list. First, what bookstore shelf-surfer isn't going to stop and let their fingers linger on the spine of that book? Second, it describes perfectly what we do as a craft. We are necromancers. We raise the dead. Like Victor Frankenstein, we wield the power of a modern Prometheus. But our spark of life, to make of dead and cold flesh a living, breathing being, comes not from lightning but from the human voice. Our words raise the dead, like a coy incantation coaxing them from moldering tombs.

I am not talking simply about living history and dressing in old-timey clothes here, either. The Park Ranger in her Stetson hat and grey polyester shirt telling the tale of one army clashing with another army does it. The docent at a local historical society wearing a flannel shirt and glasses on a chain around his neck, explaining what this or that was used for does it. The archivist unearthing and displaying a long forgotten letter in a new exhibition does it. We raise the dead and bring them back to life, if only for fleeting moments.

Raising the dead for one last photo.
CC / Paul Townsend

When we speak and share an ancient story of a soldier's loves and hates, his wants and needs, we are helping to reanimate his lips. He explains the world he lived in to the people of today. He helps them feel what he felt, know what he knew.

One of the amazing sources I recently came across is a letter penned by Justus M. Silliman of the 19th Connecticut. The soldier worked as a hospital steward in the months after the battle at Gettysburg. In one of his letter, he explains to his mother that he, "called on Dr. Baugher president of the college and told him my situation and desire to obtain books." The President explained that the college's, "library had been complete scattered by the rebels." The Reverend ushered the soldier into his home, to his own library and offered the man a book or to on personal loan. Silliman took, "Planetary and Stellar Worlds by O.M. Mitchell, and Footprints of our Creator by Hugh Miller," down from the shelf and brought them back to his camp.

He told his mother that a friend and he were using Mitchell's book to look at the stars. You can see them, two soldiers laid out on the trampled fields around the borough, staring into the night sky searching for the Pleiades or gazing at Betelgeuse like Ptolemy had thousands of years before. During the day, death and destruction reign supreme, as men moan and shriek and die. But lying on their backs in the darkness, the possibilities of the infinite universe unfold before two lonely soldiers, desperate for anything which might, "help to pass many hour pleasantly," versus wallowing in the hell that was Civil War.

For a moment, Justus Silliman, late of planet earth, walks once more. He speaks. His fingers leaf through the pages of a long lost book, stopping to read a passage here or there until his mind is bewildered by the sheer scale of the worlds beyond his world. He lives again. And then he sinks back into that undiscovered country from which, as Shakespeare put it, whose bourne no traveller returns.

Only he doesn't fully leave the earth. A piece of him still lives within the souls of those who felt his tale. When they look to the sky and catch a glimmering star, once again he will return. And again. And yet again. He becomes immortal in the memory of man, returned to life by a helpful oratorical necromancer and the souls they reach.