As a *budding* young professional in this field, I've noticed a particular concept that is tossed around here and elsewhere in the field, and that is: once this last generation of conservatives literally dies out of the museum, we will all accept technology, we won't have to fight for our websites anymore--our curators will accept it too. This concept comes out in different situations. For example, an audience member says in response to a discussion on social media that his work at the history museum does not reach out to that kind of audience, so this model won't work for him. The response is that "well that won't always be the case, because eventually those people will go away and your new audience [of the same demographic] will be tech savvy."

Really?

I just completed a master's degree [literally turned the last paper in on Monday], and in my program New Media was much more of an afterthought than anything else--and only a few of us minded. Much to my surprise, there were just as many conservative, stuck-in-their-ways 25 year olds as there seems to be at every other generation level in museums.

Is this just a function of how things work at museums? Are we doomed to eternally 'catch up' to everything that is going on in the world, no matter what it is? If we finally 'get' this technology thing, really embrace it, will there just be something new that comes along to take its place? [I hope so].

And if all this is true, the anti-tech conservatives die off, the new kids move into town, museums 'get it' and everything changes, then what happens to Museums and the Web? Will the web be something that is accepted into all other conferences about museums as commonplace as talking about "the object" or management? [Again, I hope so].

If that's the case, my question then is, what's the next conference that comes our way 20 years from now (certainly in my lifetime)? What are the predictions for the new problems we will face, once we convince all those other people that what we do here at this conference [social media, participatory design, mashups, user-generated content, digitization, etc.] is a discussion that can happen anywhere and no longer needs its own home?