In the Museum of London's recreation of a Roman high street, there is a projection of actors dressed up as a Roman crowd walking past the window. Exhibits such as these re-present knowing as experiencing. Intellectual and abstract knowledge about the exhibits and about science is converted into a version of immediate experience, for visitors' consumption. This is misleading. Instead, it promotes the idea that 'You are stepping back in time, you are experiencing Roman London'.
New technologies help to give the impression of stepping back in time.
But by attempting to give the 'whole picture' of the past, these exhibits restrict the role of individual imagination. People need to make their own imaginative leaps about what Roman Britain would have been like. New technologies are being used by museums in an effort to modernise Museums today are very concerned to cast off their dusty and dull image, and become 'modern' and 'relevant' to people's lives. They try to be noisy and exciting and about the 'real world'. The idea seems to be that these things are part of popular culture, and people like them, so museums should try to 'be there'.