In his projections of what museums would look like in the future, Adam Rozan focuses on how a new form of museum would result from changes in human need and makes the explicit choice to focus on this as a driving force rather than changes in technology. He writes, > It’s easy to fixate on technology, but too often, when we do so, we miss the important underlying forces driving change - what people want and need, how they interact with one another.

And later, > Technology provided us with new ways to realize our dreams, yet it was the public, through how they chose to spend their time, attention, and money, that had the biggest impact on our organizations.

Reading these passages I was reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” and that it is the medium itself which shapes human association and interaction. Using this framework, couldn’t technology be the driving force, in the way that it shapes the way we interact and opens up new ideas of what we want and need? There are pieces within the text that also seem to illustrate this - the “Digital Push” leading to an expanded view of what spaces could function as museums, museums becoming community spaces as the workweek and levels of employment shrink - so why make this distinction in the first place?

The thought I came to is that overall, the point of the text is to move away from the idea of museums as holders as artifacts and instead as places that serve the community. Pointing to technology as the cause of these changes would be missing the point that moving towards this idea of the museum of 2040 means actively focusing on what peoples needs are, and adapting to meet them. If we see it as an inevitability that this is what museums will become, we won’t get there.