ABSTRACT
Museums are fundamentally social and cultural institutions. They are cultural in that museums are where our society gathers and preserves valued and visible records of social, scientific, and artistic accomplishments. They are social in that the collector, curator, designer, and educator are in tacit and sometimes explicit dialogue with the visitors. They are also social in that they are places where groups go together to visit exhibitions. The study we are reporting in this chapter serves as a counterpoint to the studies of conversational groups represented in the rest of this volume in that it focuses on the private and interior conversations of the individual as he or she experiences and records the museum encounter. The record is written instead of spoken and is distinctly authored, edited, and selected. At first glance it might appear that the idea of an inner conversation is an artificial extension of the concept of a socially produced audible (or visible) act of communication between two or more people. But as recent studies of electronic conversations (Aleven & Ashley, 1997; Schofield, 1999) and older theories of dialogue with the self (G.H.Mead, 1934) have shown, the critical features of conversation, namely an awareness of social context, self-monitoring and reflection, a strong sense of other, are often preserved in these non face-to-face settings.
