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D.C. in the digital age

Technology recharges national history - and vetoes a few long lines

July 04, 2010|By Bonnie Wach, Special to The Chronicle
  • independence
    Night watchman Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is chased by a T-Rex during his memorable night at the museum.
    Credit: Rhythm and Hues

It's Wednesday morning at the National Archives, the doors have barely been open an hour, and the line already is snaking around the block and up Constitution Avenue. My husband, son and I squeeze past a couple with a toddler whose crankiness is approaching summer-in-Disneyland proportions, and up to a nearly deserted side entrance where a friendly guard waves us in.

Not even noon and I've just taught my 8-year-old a valuable lesson about democracy: The First Amendment might guarantee the right to peaceably assemble, but if you don't want to assemble for upwards of two hours to see where John Hancock put his original John Hancock, you'd better have a good Internet connection.

On a family vacation in Washington, technology was proving to be our NBF. Not only had we avoided epic queues to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by making online reservations, we'd nabbed discount museum tickets, downloaded free audio tours to our cell phone, reported live from the lunar surface, signed the Declaration of Independence and thwarted a terrorist plot on a GPS-guided spy mission in the Penn Quarter.

This was clearly not the D.C. of my grad school days - the (somewhat hazy) memories of which all involve giant stuffed woolly mammoths, grainy movies with colonials in powdered wigs and Rolling Rock beer. Like Washington crossing the Delaware, D.C. has successfully bridged the digital divide. In the course of a week, we discovered that the revolution these days is indeed being televised - in 4-D and Surround Sound.

Interactive Museums

Our suite at the St. Gregory - a four-star hotel with full kitchen, between DuPont Circle and Foggy Bottom that I snagged for $99 by becoming a "fan" on Facebook - put us in prime position to explore the city's cyberactive attractions.

After a bit of research on www.thedistrict.com, an online tourist guide, we head over to the Newseum, billed as "the world's most interactive museum." We use the hotel computer to print out tickets (10 percent off for buying online), figure out our route, and even save another buck by checking Metro fares on their Web site (rates drop from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.).

The Newseum, which opened in 2008, is a soaring glass-and-marble edifice devoted to 500 years of news and the people who made it. It takes us all of about five minutes inside to figure out that the "world's most interactive" title is no boast. To say that this place is a marvel of technological innovation is like saying teenage girls found Elvis attractive. Seven floors of touch-screens, theaters, film and video, state-of-the-art studios, computer games, interactive kiosks, documentary footage and hands-on multimedia exhibits are enough to give even my iPod-obsessed son, Rowan, a cramp in his very limber index finger.

Looking over the 20-page visitor guide, we also realize it's virtually (and physically) impossible to see the Newseum in one day without giving yourself ADD - even if you skip the "Great Moments in Sports" documentary (don't), the Berlin Wall exhibit, the Unabomber's cabin and the 4-D time travel adventure. Happily, the smart folks behind this interactive extravaganza realized this as well, and made tickets good for two consecutive days.

We begin our tour at the inspiring and heartbreaking Pulitzer Prize Photographs gallery, wandering past a collection of the 20th Century's most iconic images and watching interviews with the photographers who captured them. From there, we head to the Interactive Newsroom, where Rowan uses CGI technology to deliver a live TV report from the moon, and I compete against two teenagers in a fast-paced game of news ethics played on a giant touch-screen.

Upstairs, we trace the history of electronic news - from Roosevelt's inaugural address to Hurricane Katrina - via banks of interactive TVs, radio broadcasts and video clips, then stroll through a long corridor filled with five centuries of newspaper front pages. Rowan pulls me away from a six-inch headline proclaiming "North Pole Discovered" to point out the Call Chronicle-Examiner from April 19, 1906. The newspaper is more than a century old, but the ominous black type announcing, "Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco in Ruins" still makes us a little edgy.

Shaken and stirred

A day-and-a-half of New Media shock and awe and we're ready for some escapist adventure, so we spend the next morning at the International Spy Museum learning about Cold War bugging devices, genuine shoe phones used by secret agents not named Maxwell Smart, and early America's best espionage artists (George Washington tops the list).

Opened in 2002, the Spy Museum was among the first in D.C. to step into the Digital Age, blending history, hands-on activities and high-tech gadgetry into an experience tailor-made for Generation Xbox.

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