The particular media of an exhibition may play into, or be employed to try to work
against, visitors’ ideas about authority. As part of museums’ attempts to engage visitors
actively in the communication process, a range of now fairly familiar strategies is often
employed, such as the use of questions on text panels, providing alternative levels of
information or routes, and using various forms of interactivity. It is worth noting,
however, that some of the near orthodoxies of ‘visitor empowerment’ are not fully born
out by research. For example, the Science Museum research showed that the use of
hands-on interactive exhibits made visitors more likely to expect to be receiving
authoritative unquestionable science than to raise questions themselves (as the exhibitionmakers
had planned) (cf. Stevens and Toro-Martell n.d., p. 16). Not only did such
exhibits conjure up the expectation of a didactic health-education exhibition, in which the