At the same time as the “Better living” exhibition, two other thematic exhibitions were held at the heritage museum. I will mention the “Fun of Collecting” exhibition in a later post and focus on the “Hong Kong Popular Entertainment” exhibition here. Rather than discussing the exhibition itself, I will discuss a specific item of the exhibition that can be related to research in general.

The whole “Hong Kong Popular Entertainment” exhibition has a very strong nostalgic feel to it. It highlights forms of entertainment that mostly disappeared from Hong Kong like street theatres or Cantonese opera. We also learn how Hong Kong movies now have to include stars from all over Asia (mostly Japanese and Korean actors) in order to attract a larger crowd or how Hong Kong was first in Asia to have a professional soccer league that is now irrelevant on the global scene and ignored by the local population. 

In brief the whole exhibition makes you regret the good old days and builds a strong case against new technologies that almost entirely erased popular entertainment from Hong Kong (with the exception of horse racing betting) by making home entertainment available to the mass. The last stop at the exhibition is a corner with two buttons to press so that visitors can give their view. The question is simple: “Do you prefer mass participation entertainment or self amusement?” Although self-amusement is by far the most common form of amusement nowadays, 57,799 people pressed the mass participation button, while only 40,591 people pressed the other one.

I don’t know what the museum plans on doing with the result of this simple research, but to me it is once again a blatant example of how misleading results can be when doing research. Should the same question have been asked before the exhibition, based on actual behavior or was listing specific types of entertainments, the results would surely have been entirely different.