NODEM 2013 Conference

In recent years a rise in the number of participatory media technologies has been increased – these changes are also supportive for museums to move away from rather being suppliers of information for their visitors, and provide knowledge and tools for more active participatory engagement, instead. Diversity in social media applications challenges museum professionals to find new ways how to communicate with and to explore their visitors online and encourage debate about apt usage practices of social media. Analysis of users’ performance on online environment discloses influencing factors in terms of users’ interests, level of activity and creativity, and potentially reveals identity construction processes. The role of museums into identity construction processes of visitors is widely recognized and studied: however, there is less research about how people use museums to construct their identity in a social media site as Facebook, and in particular, what is the role of social media into processes of identity construction from the perspective of museum visitors. Our paper is about a comparative study on Facebook usage practice among central museums in Latvia and Estonia. It uses qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis to explore museum related Facebook content and to comprehend how museums use social media to construct identities of their visitors and how users construct their identities online.