Information age? The challenges of displaying information and communication technologies

On 24 October 2014 the Science Museum opened a major new permanent gal lery, Information Age. Five years in the making, the gal lery examines the last two hundred years of information and communication technologies , invi ting vis i tors to take a long view on our abi l i ty to generate, share and store information. In creating the gal lery we were conscious of a pervas ive myth of our current age: the idea that we are l iving in a world where our connected digi ta l devices have made us faster and more efficient, and that this rapid transformation of technology has caused a paradigm shi ft in one pos itive leap for humanity. In Information Age we wanted to chal lenge this idea, invi ting our vis i tors to cons ider their personal experience of change through technology, but to see i t in the context of the experience of our predecessors . We wanted vis i tors to encounter the novelty of the electric telegraph in the 1840s, to understand the ways that the use of new telephone technologies supported and disrupted existing socia l s tructures , and to view ‘new’ computer networks such as the World Wide Web as a part of the ‘old’ networks of the telephone and telegraphy. But such an approach brought with i t a number of chal lenges for a museum display.