Category: Visitor Experience

Sometimes you see the words “audience” and “visitors” being used more or less interchangeably. But to me they represent different concepts and there was a discussion on this point some time ago on the Museum Audience Insight blog. While there was some debate about this, I took the view that “audiences” was a broader term than “visitors”; audiences were passive recipients whereas the word “visitor” implied something more active (through physical or virtual presence). So, you try to reach audiences but they may or may not be listening. Visitors, on the other hand, have fronted up and expect to see something that interests them.

Thinking about this again more recently, I’ve noticed that there’s an interesting semantic distinction between the two. Readers familiar with their latin roots will not be surprised by the fact that that “audience” is derived from the word for hearing and listening, whereas “visitor” has its roots in videre, which means to see or to notice. And, at least in Western cultures, we tend to privilege what we see above what we hear (compare how we think of “eyewitness testimony” as opposed to “hearsay evidence”). So it’s not surprising that such assumptions have, knowingly or otherwise, crept into the way we conceptualise audiences as opposed to visitors.

But something is still missing. Visitors themselves can still be passive or active. In media, this has been described as a “lean-forward versus lean-back” model for the way people consume online content. “Lean back” is passive relaxation mode, while “lean forward” is active involvement in searching, creating and critiquing.* In a visitor experience context, I’ll draw upon Nina Simon’s work and characterise these “lean forwards” as participants. Just like there are many different types of visitation, Simon has characterised varieties of participation (but I won’t go into details here). Participation also has interesting etymological roots, having come from the Latin participium, itself borrowed from the Greek meaning “to share”.

So how do audiences, visitors and participants relate to one another?

At the simplest levels, Participants can be considered a subset of Visitors, who in turn are a subset of Audiences. In theory this could also be conceptualised as a progression, with an individual moving from Audience Member to Visitor to Participant. Is moving through this progression a meaningful measure of engagement? It it an unhelpful oversimplification? Do we need a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between audiences, visitors and participants?

*I recall attending a presentation that referred to “lean-forward” versus “lean-back” in heritage interpretation, and I *think* I remember who it was, but I’m not 100% sure. If it was you, let me know so I can link to it!

Experience, n & v:
n: 1 – actual observation or practical acquaintance with facts or events
—2 – knowledge or skill resulting from this
—3 – an event regarded as affecting one (an unpleasant experience)
v: 1 – to have experience of, undergo
—2 – feel or be affected by (an emotion, etc)
– Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 2nd Ed (2002)

Straightforward enough, huh? Well maybe not.

I’ve been reading  Experience, evidence and sense: the hidden cultural legacy of English by Anna Wierzbicka. In it, she argues that the word experience, particularly in the third sense of the noun described above, is a peculiarly Anglo-English concept that cannot be easily translated into other languages. Furthermore, this use of the word is a relatively recent development in the English language, not appearing until around the 18th century. Its rise coincides with the rise of empiricism in British philosophy (Hume, Locke), in contrast to the rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz) that continued to dominate philosophical thought in the rest of Europe.

The original sense of experience was something that built up over time: experience as a body of accumulated knowledge (e.g. an experienced tradesperson). However experience has expanded to also refer to something that can be, ahem, ‘experienced’ in the moment – it is sensory, self-aware and subjective, combining perceptions, thoughts and feelings. In other words we can have experiences, and we are aware that we are having experiences while we are having them. Experience has become a countable noun: we can have an experience going horseriding; this is a very different thing from gaining experience in horseriding. However, this relatively new and now ubiquitous use of the word experience apparently has no equivalent outside the English language:

“The word experience plays a vital role in English speakers’ ways of thinking and provides a prism through which they interpret the world. While its range of use is broad and includes a number of distinct senses, several of these senses have a common theme that reflects a characteristically Anglo perspective on the world and on human life. This is why the word experience is often untranslatable (without distortion) into other languages, even European languages” (Wierzbicka, 2010, p.31)

So I’m wondering what this means for the way we conceptualise and study Visitor Experiences in a global context. It’s a significant question, as numerous theories in tourism, education and other areas hinge on defining characterising the experience. Obviously, English speakers aren’t the only people to have ‘experiences’. But maybe we are the only linguistic group to conceptualise and describe them in the way that we do. So when we talk about experiences across cultures, how do we know we’re all talking about the same thing?

“Given the central role of English in today’s science, including psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, it is particularly important that such culture-specific constructs are not absolutised and also that they be well understood” (Wierzbicka, 2010, p.30)

I’m probably late to the party on this – it’s likely others have already given this considerable thought. I’d appreciate links to additional resources on this point. Given ‘experience’ is a key word in my thesis title, it is probably worth my while mulling it over for a while.

References:
Pine, B. J. I., & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: work is theatre & every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (2010). Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.