A study of Museum Visitors’ Autocommunication in the Transition to Digital Media

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption across the globe and brought about a social landscape change called “social distancing” that has rapidly transformed the world into a digital society. In the process of rapid social change, which has been referred to as the ‘New Normal’, meaning a new everyday life, the biggest change has been the change in the form and content of social relationships. In this study, we will examine how the interaction of visitors with the cultural texts on display in museums has changed in response to social change. The museum, a place that was closed and open only to a select group of people in the past, has grown into a platform that can be experienced by everyone who can access it in a digital environment, creating a creative cultural phenomenon in which people, as subjects of an individual environment, perform autocommunication through relationships with others, reflecting their own identity and creating new ones. To confirm and summarize this, we will focus on the theory of “cultural interaction” by Russian semiotician Yuri M. Lotman. As a result of the research, we will derive the meaning of museum visits from the perspective of cultural interaction. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of how the form of viewing that leads to “autocommunication” centered on the relationship between collections and visitors within the exhibition text can be newly created as a cultural memory as museums of the past and present move into the era of digital media.