Museum participation in a network society: A reflection

of the author and not the views of the Flemish Community. The Flemish Community cannot be held accountable for the potential use of the communicated views and data. 1 Nowadays 'cultural participation' is often reduced to a matter of 'physical access'. It is used to point out which and more particularly how many people visit a cultural institution or take part in a cultural event. In this paper we will first discuss the concept of 'cultural participation' within Flemish cultural policy (and more specific within museum policy) in order to question its democratic character. When it concerns ICT's (and more particularly the WWW), another layer is added to this discussion which consists out of a dimension built upon two opposite positions. From a utopian point of view it is believed that 'virtual museums' have a democratizing potential that will help to increase virtual and real museum attendance. From a dystopian and technological deterministic perspective it is in contrast feared that the virtual museums will make their real counterparts superfluous. In the second part of the paper, we ask what the existence of virtual museum participation implies for 'the museum' and for 'the participation/participants'. Based on a study of literature 'the virtual museum' is defined and a series of international and Belgian art museum websites are evaluated, using website usability heuristics. The comparative analysis clearly shows that the Belgian art museum websites are still underdeveloped and that a lot can be learned from some of these international websites. At the same time these lessons (from the international examples) should be drawn with some care, as even these high-profile websites still show many opportunities for improvement.