It's the distance from everyday life that is valuable. It reminds us that we can't consume everything. The museum is not entertainment, after all. It's something else. Samuel Sachs II, director of the very traditional Frick Collection in New York and ironically one of the leading authorities on interactive museum technology, also fears that interactivity is blunting the art of looking at objects.
Screens are often simply mind-numbing.
We seem to have forgotten that there is a crucial difference between information and knowledge. Let alone entertainment. Learning to look at real things is not the same as playing with information. Dorothy Dunne, head of education at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, agrees. To actually see things is something of an art which one learns as a child.