Touching Vs. Understanding
On the plane home last week I talked to a sharp Yale historian, and realized we devote far more resources to preserving historical sites, and to making history available via museums, than we do to funding professional historians to make sense of it all. That reminded me of complaints that NASA spends far more on sending instruments into space to collect data than it does on funding scientists to analyze that data. In both cases we collect far more data than ever gets carefully analyzed.
Now part of the explanation must be that the public can more easily see historical sites, museums, and space instruments than historians and data analysts. But that doesn’t seem to me a sufficient explanation – I suspect we are also just more interested in touching the past, and in touching space, than in understanding either. We talk about understanding because that is a modern applause light, but really we just like to touch exotic things. The more we can touch, the further is our reach, and the more important and powerful we must be. I wonder how much more this explains.
Added: We have related desires to see art and sport events in person, up close, and to meet and touch celebrities in person.
I agree with Jonathan and Tim about collecting now in order to be able to analyze later -- and collecting and preserving is importantly to do properly and quickly or information is lost, while analysis can take its sweet time provided the same materials are available to work from.
But other than that -- touching is easy to explain, to "have something to show for it". Everyone accepts that it's expensive to get a bunch of shiny machines and collect a heap of data; they can see what it is. Does everyone accept that it's expensive to get a 300-page report explaining it? Or, worse, to get a report on why that data doesn't tell us what we hoped it would? How many people would consider the money spent to fund that analysis wasted?
Fetishizing objects (or objects of attention) in general is easy. You need to get physically close to them and then immediately you have something that not everyone has. And then you check it off and move on to the next thing. Really knowing about what they are is hard; you sink effort into it and it takes more time than going on a whirlwind tour. Traveling, too, seems to be more about "seeing the sights" than knowing the city. Checking the checkboxes, contrasted with facing the unfamiliar. Surface interactions, that take money and time and physical effort but less deep understanding, either to get them yourself or to show others.
(When I was a kid I loved to find signed books -- an object that was once touched by someone I admired. People who wrote books were distant to me and that was the only way I knew to get close to them. Now I think signed books are silly; I know real live authors! "I had a great conversation with X about his book" is much more thrilling than "I have a signed book". But there's nothing I can display, even though what I actually have is more valuable.)
We're also saying by such choices that there's value in objects themselves, and that the information is not as valuable -- asserting there is something special about the object even if enough information exists to indistinguishably recreate it, or at least to transmit everything important about it. It's the sort of thought that finds mind uploading abhorrent because it would never be the real thing -- that think what's real is what we can sense directly, and what can't be copied or recreated; being reproducible, or reducible to parts we can reproduce, lessens its value, so we insist there is no way to replace the original. People feel cheated if they see a celebrity impersonator in place of the star even if they couldn't tell while she was performing, or to receive a perfect diamond created in a lab rather than one mined from the ground.
(Hm, longer braindump than I started out intending...)
"Caio, do you think that is why people like to meet and touch celebrities too, just so that they seem 'more real'?"
I think that's altogether different, but in a sense, yes. People form one-sided relationships with celebrities through mass media, and the desire to meet celebrities is, I think, the desire to make that relationship more real. There's definitely also a desire for fame by association, just like seeing historical locations gives you some sort of intellectual bragging rights. But I don't think that's the whole story, and I don't think the analogy works that well, mostly because people's ideas about celebrities are largely, if not entirely, fictional and idealized, and firsthand experience is likely to be at odds with that. Firsthand experience of historical sites, however, is complementary to history.