Lynn Dierking, talking in the context of a July 2009 podcast discussion on museum visitor research and how visitors might interface with online tools and personal online research…

“the social media world is still very underused and unexplored by many museums — in fact there’s a tremendous fear of them, and we’ve been visiting some institutions that are afraid they’re going to be critiqued by the public…”

“there’s also a tendency to think ‘we need interactive [exhibits]’, but pretty much across the board, even talking to youth about it — they will talk about the fact that they sit at a computer all the time, or that they can do that at home…”

Although it seems that most don’t do that at home. John Falk, in the same podcast…

“what little data there is suggests that … despite the desire to drive people back to the web and other sources after a visit, it’s still pretty abysmal — less than ten per cent of the public are following up experiences [after visiting a museum] by going back to the web.”

Fear is an interesting addition (one I’d not really considered before) to sloth and funding issues, in terms of the factors preventing the humanities from finding additional/popular audiences online — and thus generating much-needed public support and understanding — during a time of crisis.