What should it look like?

There is a multitude of digital cultural mediation offers today. Every larger institution has already digged deep into its pockets, either to have its own app produced or to park its content in an application.

inventory

Many companies that specialize in the implementation of mediation apps sell the basic form of an application again and again and only fix small details such as e.g. the surface of the application according to the requirements of the customer. In other words, a lot of money goes into one and the same task. On the other hand, there are the users, who react with an increasing stagnation of interest due to the resulting large number of apps. Most people know that and this is confirmed by facts and figures. Nevertheless, it is often not entirely clear what a sensible alternative would be. An investment for a homepage makes of course sense, because of course every company nowadays needs its own and modern website. That is why many people make their content available on their own website and work with QR codes. In principle, this is not a bad approach because it is cheaper, but it is and remains an isolated solution, because it always has its limits.

Of parallel worlds and their borders

It would make more sense to think away borders and invest the budget in the preparation of the content instead of investing in another parallel application, which is already available in thousands of versions, and for this very reason only prompts people to stop consuming it. An application is - as difficult as it is to admit, because all project managers with an affinity for technology are usually euphoric at the beginning of such a prestige project, unfortunately often doomed to become the next dead body on a user's mobile phone display, which often  falls victim to a deletion process in case of a memory clearance. What is allowed to remain is YouTube, Facebook, Insta & Co. Another attempt to reinvent the wheel leads to a dead end, as experience has shown all the time. The laboriously and carefully prepared content thus disappears into oblivion and does not reach the consumer in the desired form in the long term. Despite well-intentioned digital intentions, data is sidelined in this way. Stagnating usage figures lead to less maintenance, thus obsolete data. A vicious circle. Of course, it can also happen that one or the other user during a second stay in the same museum or in the same region might bring himself to download an app that has already been deleted a second time, but this is certainly the exception and which does not mean that users would not interrupt or finally end this cycle the third time at the latest.

Conclusion

Institutions and tourism professionals want dialogue with visitors, response or resonance. In the digital world we are talking about comment functions, sharing, followers, crowd. What does that mean next? That everyone should build their own digital and social universe? No, not at all. Platforms will come to the fore - unfortunately much too late in this area - isolated solutions will disappear more and more. It would make sense to have a platform that is constantly evolving and thus more functional than letting institutions invest money in the maintenance of their own isolated solutions, which ultimately rest in peaceful coexistence. In this context, it is important that you are still in possession of your data yourself, have the opportunity to maintain it by yourself and decide under what conditions you’d like to make this data available. The existing willingness of institutions to help themselves with digital solutions shows how great the need is for a platform on which cultural content can be presented and seen by as many people as possible. People who exchange ideas and then accidentally stumble across you and possibly follow you - mutually use synergies.