Where is the #musetech community online?

By Max Evjen, Emily Haight, & Jonathan Munar

In 2010, the #musetech hashtag started on Twitter. Discussions on the platform in that hashtag became increasingly active. A study was conducted on use of the #MCN2016 hashtag, and the results showed that 600 people attended the conference, 800 people were using the hashtag, and over the three days of the conference there were 9,000 tweets (Whoa!). Many museum technology professionals found the #musetech hashtag on Twitter to be an indispensable resource. By 2018 activity started to wane and was very noticeable by 2019, and once Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, there has been little to no activity in the #musetech hashtag on that platform. At the MCN 2025 Proposal Speed dating event, Jonathan Munar and Max Evjen came up with the idea of finding out where everyone in the community is online now. We invited Emily Haight to join us on the proposal, and we planned the project to be in 3 parts: 1) send out a survey to the #musetech community, 2) hold the in-person session at MCN 2025, and 3) to publish the results for the community. This is that write up! We hope it is insightful for the #musetech community.

The survey

In fall 2025, we surveyed professionals across the #musetech and #musesocial community to better understand where digital conversations are happening and how that’s evolving. 

We shared and circulated a survey of thirteen questions and had forty-one respondents. Respondents represented a cross-section of the field, including art museums, libraries, and cultural nonprofits. Most work in mid-to-large institutions and hold senior or specialized digital roles (from social media managers to chief digital officers) across a wide range of experience levels.

The survey explored which platforms professionals use regularly, where they follow sector conversations, how collaboration happens across organizations, shifts in social media usage over the past five years, and attitudes toward social media’s value in professional work.

Of the survey respondents, half had been working in the field for fifteen years or more and only nine of the respondents had been working in the field for less than seven years. The respondents were somewhat evenly split in terms of the size of the organizations. More than half were from larger, dense cities with many museums and cultural organizations. 

Nearly half of the respondents indicated that their use of social media had decreased. Five people said it had increased. The volume of responses fell in the middle in terms of how useful they found social media, but the volume indicated that attitudes around social media use were more negative. 

Based on the responses, it appears that there has been a return to more traditional modes of outreach for collaboration and professional development, including but not limited to email, listservs, conferences, and in-person networking. The social platform that people indicated was most useful for collaborations was LinkedIn, as well as most useful for conversations involving the #musetech and #musesocial hashtags. 

It would be interesting to think about how the results would be impacted if more respondents were newer to the field, as the majority of respondents have more than 15 years of experience in the sector. 

The session

On October 21st, 2025, we facilitated the in-person session “Where is the #musetech community online” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN for the MCN 2025 conference. We posted sticky easel pad notes on the wall that contained selected questions from the survey. Attendees in the session were asked to put Post-it notes containing responses to each corresponding easel pad note. We used affinity mapping to tabulate how many similar responses were posted for each one while we discussed each question. One thing to note was that the in-person session included more early-career participants than who answered the survey. The session questions and results from that discussion follow:

• In the past 5 years, has your social media use increased (4), decreased (13) or stayed the same (4)?
  • Discussion: There was a question about if we wanted personal or professional; we said they should choose.
• What platform holds the most promise for the #musetech and #musesocial communities?
  • 8 posted LinkedIn
  • 5 posted Slack
  • 4 posted Discord
  • 3 posted Email
  • 2 posted Reddit
  • 1 posted Bluesky
  • 1 posted Instagram
  • 1 posted YouTube
  • 1 posted GeoCities 🙂
    • Discussion during this question:
      • Emily Haight wanted to know are we just returning to pre-social media communication?
      • Someone wanted to know if they are required to be on LinkedIn for the job.
      • There was a discussion about how some use LinkedIn as a Visitor while some use it as a Resident (according to David O. White’s Visitor and Resident Model).
      • Someone discussed how the “boringness” of LinkedIn could be a good thing—depending on what community is using it.

• Where do collaborations or cross-organizational collaborations usually start for you?
  • 7 posted In Real Life
  • 6 posted Email
  • 3 posted Slack
  • 1 posted Signal Chat
  • 1 posted DMs
  • 1 posted Instagram
• What Social Media platforms do you regularly use for professional purposes?
  • 15 posted LinkedIn
  • 5 posted Instagram
  • 2 posted Email
  • 1 posted Reddit
  • 1 posted TikTok
  • 1 posted Bluesky
  • 1 posted Mastodon
    • Discussion during these questions:
      • Max Evjen asked everyone if LinkedIn would be what we lost from Twitter, and the consensus in responses was, no, it would not be.
      • One person noted how the social channels are just trying to get higher engagement on the channel, but not really organizing for community engagement.
      • Aaron Cope suggested MCN host its own Mastodon instance. But he also brought up that it requires community moderation.
      • Emily Haight asked how many people are going to follow up in the Slack SIG communities post-conference; a few people raised their hands, while Max Evjen and others remarked that that used to happen on Twitter all the time.

• What platforms do you primarily use to follow #musetech or #musesocial conversations?
  • 7 posted None
  • 3 posted Slack
  • 2 posted Email
  • 2 posted Word of Mouth
  • 2 posted LinkedIn
  • 1 posted Bluesky
  • 1 posted Substack
• What platforms do you find the most helpful for cross-organization collaboration?
  • 9 posted Slack
  • 4 posted Email
  • 2 posted Instagram
  • 2 posted Discord
  • 2 posted Google Drive/Suite
  • 1 posted Teams
  • 1 posted Outlook
    • Discussion during these questions:
      • Emily Haight noted that nobody is using the big social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) for professional collaboration. Whereas a lot of cross-institutional collaboration happened on Twitter, when the #musetech hashtag was active.
      • Someone lamented about how they had to miss a MuseWeb conference one time, but could follow along on Twitter and see most of what was happening due to the live posting and pictures. Emily noted that you could use Twitter to know what was happening in concurrent sessions that you would have to miss at the conference.
      • Miranda Kerr noted how they used to hold free events where 500 people would register and 475 would show up, but now maybe 1 person shows up.
      • Aaron Miller described going to a MuseWeb conference when everyone had their laptop up and their TweetDeck opened, and maybe he didn’t want to return to that.
      • Amanda Dearolph discussed that the active #musetech hashtag made it easier to understand what was happening at conferences.
      • Emily Haight noted that people are now posting in closed communities, like Slack communities, and discussed how the Facebook Social Media Managers group has not been active, while it was during the pandemic.
      • Doug Hegley noted that the #musetech hashtag on Twitter was “lightning in a bottle” and after that it’s really hard to move to a new platform.
      • Someone discussed how our appetite for that kind of communication may just be diminished.
      • Final thoughts: Someone noted how the question that indicated social media use, 13 posted they use less social media, and they felt burned out by social media. They are striving for engagement with real people.  
      • Max Evjen noted that the study that Marty Spellerberg provided about the MCN Community he found that overwhelmingly people wanted the in-person conference back. 
      • We also said we would publish the results of this discussion – people asked “what platform?” (to laughs all around).

What’s next?

It was discussed in the session that only Bluesky and Mastodon are designed to provide the opportunity to build community (the rest are moving to a promotion model), but people don’t necessarily want to go to those platforms. The willingness to participate in and collaborate in social media appears to be waning in favor of private channels and in-person meetups.

Though most of the engagement with the #musetech hashtag remains LinkedIn, there still are negative attitudes about that platform (there were also negative attitudes about Twitter when the #musetech hashtag was active, as well). If LinkedIn isn’t serving us, we will find other ways to share, but it’s not likely we’ll ever get back to that “lightning in a bottle” that Doug Hegley brought up to describe the #musetech hashtag on Twitter.

It will be useful to think again about the theme of the conference: resilience. Maybe some of the collaboration we’re doing is more analog now (direct outreach via email, sharing in Slack groups, posting more generally on LinkedIn) but the point is that even when the tech landscape isn’t serving us and we face institutional challenges against our current political backdrop, we as a community are still finding ways to connect.

It will be interesting to see where this conversation goes in a few years, if the landscape looks the same or different. Certainly things are very different now than a few years ago.

Thanks to all who participated in the survey and the session, and we can’t wait to see you all at MCN 2026 in Seattle! Check out the schedule! Since our session had a focus on this particular community we are excited for Isabella Bruno’s and Marina Gross-Hoy’s session “Neither Here Nor There: Musetech as Ecotone”!