Au Tales from Facebook 1

In Tales from Facebook, Miller explores several different fascinating aspects of what Facebook is, what Facebook means, and what Facebook does for different people. Each portrait of a person that he has interviewed is quite similar to a profile you might see on Facebook. We learn about their interests, their family or friends, what type of social life they lead, and what kind of personality they have. For someone like “Marvin”, Facebook can be seen as necessary for facilitating one’s business or professional life, while making his/her personal life more complicated. For instance, Marvin needs to spend a certain portion of his day communicating through Facebook because it is on Facebook where he can advertise cocoa products (for his business) and communicate with potential customers.

 However, because his wife realizes this, she is constantly looking over his shoulder, asking about any new friends he might have on Facebook, or how he knows this person or that person. In this chapter, Miller explains how Facebook can ruin relationships/marriages because it makes potential threats “more visible” (8). And though Marvin himself doesn’t exactly admit to pursuing other people online, it is clear that he does not prevent certain “clients” from advancing on him. I myself can testify to the power Facebook has over relationships. I had a long term relationship that ended in part because I had suspicions about cheating (which were true). I would not have had these suspicions if it were not for Facebook. Ultimately, the end of the relationship was for the better, but perhaps in some cases Facebook causes trouble where there aught not to be any.

In Chapter 4, Miller interviews a young woman named “Vishala.” This chapter brought to my attention the idea that people are more often going places for the purpose of being seen or having their presence documented through pictures so that those pictures can be put on Facebook. This is significant because it made me think about how more and more people’s identities are matching up with their identities on Facebook. Perhaps one day there will be no difference. If who we are depends on how others perceive us, then maybe our Facebook profiles are just another way to solidify how others perceive us, and eventually there will be no difference between who we are and our profiles on Facebook. Some may even say this is true already, especially for those who are Facebook friends with people they are not “friends” with in real life. Just like how people are gaining more and more capabilities to edit what they say through text or instant messaging as opposed to letters or phone calls, people are more and more able to edit their images to the public. We can choose what we expose of ourselves to the public. We can “untag” photographs or delete comments.

In Chapter 6, Miller introduces “Ajani,” and the concept that by making so much of his/her life public, one can fabricate a kind of buffer against society that makes their lives more private than one would ordinarily believe. Facebook serves as a creative and reliable release for Ajani, someone who must constantly share her thoughts with the world. But at the same time, despite her constant posts and updates, “you could spend a year on her Facebook and have no sense at all of her key relationships” (75). She keeps a good distance between herself and her onlookers.

Similarly, chapters 7, 8 and 10 describe what purpose Facebook serves for others. This includes “Aaron”, a teenager who uses Facebook as a means of after school communication with those from his school or girls from other schools, “Michael” and his wife who use Facebook as a way to spread the word about their Pentecostal beliefs, and a business man Burton, who like Marvin uses Facebook as a way to facilitate his work and make professional connections. In section B of Part II, Miller discusses the overall significance of Facebook, and what Facebook is. I thought it was fascinating that he described each individual as “quite literally a social networking site long before Facebook existed” (165). Does this mean that Facebook is actually a digitalization of what has already existed? The idea that cyberspace is a “place” rather than a thing is emphasized through Facebook. This also makes me think of the movie Tron which, for me at least provided a concrete depiction of what cyberspace would look like if we could see it as another world. Other concepts that were discussed in this section, include Facebook as meta-friend (the idea that we can have a relationship with Facebook itself, rather than just other people—that facebook is there for us at any hour, etc.), and that Facebook changes our relationship with time and space.

--Winnie Au 

Lopez Television 1

   Television has become a tool in modern society. The TV set is no longer simply a source of entertainment for the masses of public in the world but a tool for marketing ideas, politics and products. In American society, we are defined by the genre of television program which we subscribe to and group ourselves accordingly. If you do not watch the show Glee, but your friend does, chances are you will not understand half of the references he or she makes to the show. People tend to group themselves around the type of entertainment they choose, seeking fraternity with those who can relate to their opinions of what they have watched. This is a trend that is quite common in American society and is a sign of what Lila Abu-Lughod refers to in her chapter, The Objects of Soap Opera.
   
        The chapter begins with a controversy in Egypt about the role of television programming in Egyptian society and whether it should be aimed at advancing the people culturally by giving the Egyptian people "familiarity with the news, appreciation of art, a taste for art, music and theater" (Abu-Lughod 378)as defined by Muhammad Fadil, a Egyptian director vs. what Fadil described as "pumpkin seed" (378)programming which satiated entertainment goals but did nothing to advance viewers knowledge.
  
       I, for one, do not believe that the medium of television should be held to the high expectation of bringing cultural value to viewers because of the very mode in which television is watched. In order to enjoy television, you must be stagnant and inactive, sitting on a couch. This is a complete contradiction of the effort it takes to be a "mobile, politically participating opinion holding personality essential to modernity" (376) which Abu-Lughod mentions.

      Abu-Lughod refers to the ethnographic work that she did in an Egyptian village near Luxor and how she observed that because of the daily strife that the villagers had to contend with, television did not play a central role in their lives. She stated that such villagers make "elusive targets for cultural elite's modernizing message" because television "does not displace whatever already existed". (Abu-Lughod 387) This is proof that the reason television plays such a central role in the lives of many Americans is because we do not share many of the hardships that these villagers endure. We are fortunate in this country to have the luxury to enjoy Television and adapt it to our lives so centrally, though I believe that it is not a productive use of time nor can it lead to any type of meaningful cultural epiphany.

Meer Cinema 1

In this discussion on cinema and on the experience of cinema, I would like to discuss more specifically the notions of consciousness, mimesis, desire and affect, themes that are present in all three of the essays.

            First of all, Kracauer talks about the stupefying effect of cinema, just like an addiction to drugs, the idea of being “released from the grip of consciousness” (159). This hypnotic effect he discusses is quite interesting insofar as the implication of senses in cinema might be linked to the chemical fabrication of film and to the indexical characteristic of the picture. It seems the same idea that tries to convey the director of photography for Nam Naadu who explains that he feels like he is “painting with light”. Rutherford also talks about the “energy” of the image and I think this is also related to the chemical mystery of the moving camera oscura. When Kracauer says that the reaction of the spectator is one of a person who is dreaming, drifting out of consciousness, “in a state between waking and sleeping” (162), I agree with that to some extent. In fact, if we define dream as the realm of possibility where creation and action are intertwined, cinema also illustrates this, as the camera becomes the moving eye of the dreamer. Just like a dream, cinema acts as an escape from a reality bound by space and time, because cinematic techniques allow us to distort time (ellipses, flashbacks) and space (special effects).

            Towards the end of his piece, Kracauer explains the two moments during the cinematic experience: the unconscious affect related to senses and the drifting back into consciousness. What happens between these two moments? The question of that journey, the drifting back and forth through consciousness and unconsciousness is essential to the cinematic experience. This particular aspect relates in a way to the idea of mimesis: when my senses fully react to the motion picture (the creation of affect, as defined on page 63 in Anand Pandian’s article), I am hypnotized and drawn into the film. However, there is something in the analysis of Rutherford that was rather hard to grasp. She makes the argument that Nowhere to Hide (and the Korean new wave in general) is a cinema of affect (rather than “emotion”, following the distinction we made in class on Thursday) and thus of mimesis. But I was under the impression that this affect was particularly possible when the mise en scène is non-diegetic, when everything is within the frame. The excerpt of Nowhere to Hide we saw is on the contrary diegetic in my opinion and therefore, as we are “shown” all the fabrication of the movie (unrealistic scenes, fast montage, special effects, artificial lights…), we are brought out of the frame of the motion picture. I might understand it for other movies, but the presence of affect for the spectator did not strike me for Nowhere to Hide. Maybe it is simply related to the fact that this affect is triggered by cultural codes as well, as it is described in Anand Pandian’s article.

            The last thing I would like to discuss is desire in cinema, and the idea of longing described in Pandian’s ethnographic field work made me think about this sentence of the French philosopher Novalis: “Philosophy is the nostalgia for a place we have never known”. In a way, I feel that the desire related to the experience of cinema is somewhat the “nostalgia for a place we have never known”

- Ayan Meer

Redsun Photography 1

The readings this week offered two different views on how people can use photography. In his article, Jonathan Crary describes the way Westerners view vision and how it has changed over time. He argues that today people see vision as separate from the observer. Where once people thought vision was like looking at the world through a camera they now do not trust the eye and they know it has potential to deceive. This argument rang true to me when considering it in terms of technological developments in photography. In the past, and there are still cases today, of photographs being used as a raw objective image of seeing the world. Landscapes photographs are popular because it can help people feel “close” to nature even if they are in an urban city. The photograph is taken for what it is, and the people can put their own meaning into it. These people seem to assume that the photograph is depicting a “reality” that they know. These people can only make these assumptions if they trust that the image itself is objective and not manipulated in anyway. The shift that has occurred in photography in the Western world, like the shift in the 19^th century, is that people no longer can trust what they see. With the invention of digital cameras people can now manipulate faces, backgrounds and all types of images. Like Crary says, “The issue was not just how does one know what is real, but that new forms of the real were being fabricated and a new truth and the new truth about the capacities of a human subject was being articulated in these terms.” In the Western world, manipulation is seen as more a negative thing that disrupts the reality depicted in a photograph.

            Pinney and Sprague’s articles offer a different view of photography that has not been influenced by the shift that Crary wrote about. Both in the Yoruba and Central India, photographers manipulate photos to add meaning to the picture. Both write about how formal portraits of people are popular in photography. In Yoruba vision “implies clarity and definition of form and line, and a subsequent clarity and identity. In India people in photographs are seen as the “sign of being a person.” Here the contrast from Western thoughts on photography is that the manipulation of the photos offers meaning to the people who have them. The outfits and formality of the photo can tell something about a person, like his or her status in a community.

            I would like to further discuss the differences between these two cultures and what vision and photography means to the Western culture compared to India and Yoruba. What can be gained or lost from manipulating a photo? Also, what is it about photos that allow people to have such an emotional connection to them? 

DeBakey Photography 1

At first glance, I expected this week’s topic to be a little more straightforward than those we have dealt with thus far. While video, radio, and print media all have an element of direct communication involved (through an actual discourse of words), photography seemed to be to really just be made up of one element: the visual. And while this is somewhat true on the surface, I was amazed to find out how deep something so simple could become right off the bat, with my reading of the Crary piece.

            Although Crary touched on photography itself, his writing focused much more closely on his idea of the camera obscura—the tendency of people, after the emergence of photo media, to image real life in the world as looking out into that world through the lens of a camera. I found it interesting that this work looked at the topic by analyzing the observer/recipient of photography rather than the subject of the photo. In fact, Crary seems to argue that over time, the camera obscura has transformed, needing to update itself as our world modernizes.

It has come to be that “the observer is simultaneously the object of knowledge and the object of procedures of stimulation and normalization, which have the essential capacity to produce experience for the subject” (Crary 41). No longer does a photo itself hold a certain meaning; there is no way for a specific meaning to be conveyed clearly and truthfully through that medium. It is up to the observer to give it meaning, calling the truthfulness of photography even more into question: “The issue was not just how does one know what is real, but that new forms of the real were being fabricated and a new truth about the capacities of a human subject as being articulated in these terms” (Crary 40).

            So what happens on the part of the subject? Does it even matter what goes on behind the scenes of a photo if its destiny is to be misinterpreted anyway? Sprague and Pinney both discuss the question of whether a photo can convey certain things about a person. I felt that Sprague’s description of photography in the Yoruba tribe in West Africa was almost more relatable to painting. He emphasized the use of different poses and props and settings to convey certain traditional information about the subjects, whether about the holiday they were celebrating, or their social or political status. This left me wondering, though: In modern day America, we are more familiar with photography as an act of capturing a moment. Sprague’s description of Yoruba photography seems very premeditated to me, whereas I think of photography more as reactionary. As soon as I had this realization, I continued reading, and stumbled upon Sprague’s admittance that “many Yoruba would not consciously know, or be able to articulate, how their photographs reflect commonly held values and myths,” but instead, “the actual structure and symbolic meaning of the photographic image are not consciously considered; it serves only to trigger the viewer’s memory of the subject” (Sprague 251). I was glad that he acknowledged the portion of society that does not think of photography as anything more than a way to capture a moment worth capturing.

            Finally, Pinney takes Sprague’s view of photography one step further. While Sprague emphasizes the structural formulation of a photo, Pinney draws the personal factor to our attention. The one line that sums up his question is that one “should be able to read a man’s character from his face” (Pinney 90). He seems to decide that there can exist a “disjunction between the external surface and the moral interior” (Pinney 92), and for that reason, it is nearly impossible to accurately depict and assess someone’s true personality through photography. I’d argue that this is true of any visual art or media form, and perhaps even true of other media, such as cinema. The level of honesty that a photographer, can expect from his subjects is definitely worth questioning. And, even if the subject is being completely honest, only so much of that can be portrayed through a two-dimensional image.

We even touched on this in lecture today, and something I’d like to add to our discussion is the possibility that photographers often go into their shoots with an idea of what they’d like the resulting image to be, to show and tell about the subject. The portrait of the Afghan girl, for example, is supposed to show her fear and vulnerability. However, an observer would look at it, know the circumstances of the photo shoot (for National Geographic), see her bright green eyes and luxurious colorful clothing (probably edited for effect), and doubt the intended meaning, giving it a meaning of their own. Going full circle back to Crary, what is reality in this case? Is it what the photographer intended, what each individual observer takes from the resulting photo, or none of the above? I’d argue none of the above, because to accurately depict someone’s personality through photography, especially after reading Sprague and Pinney, is nearly impossible.

Jessica DeBakey

Fox Video 1

To say the least, this week's mediation, video, was an extremely interesting one. Learning about YouTube in order to explain video's mediation was fun, but at times quite frustrating. First of all, I am not sure any of us can say that we sat through and watched every single video posted on this week's readings. In addition, I think many of us have viewed a lot of these videos previously. With that said, it is fair to say that we all have used YouTube at one point or another, maybe as a producer and more commonly as a viewer/comsumer.

 I was really struck by a statement I came across in the Juhasz article, that "we are looking at ourselves when looking at the internet". This really was shocking to me, because I think it is extremely true-espeically when it comes to using YouTube. Anyone and everyone has used YouTube to not only view "popular" videos, but to use it to create anything they want others to view. "We teach the machine" like Juhasz says. We are constantly seeing others posting the most interesting to the most mundane things on video, or posting these eccentric to hilarious videos ourselves. I identify with this specifically when I immediately linked this control we have over the internet with how my friend (who shall remain anonymous for good reason) would go onto Wikipedia and add in ridiculous and completely false facts and information under whichever topic he wanted to screw up. This type of manipulation completely parallels Juhasz's thought that we need to by cynical enough to see through the ridiculousness that people upload onto YouTube, and that this type of mediation limits the truly revolutionary potential of technology. The fact that I had previously seen and heard about the Miss Teen USA 2007 response to an interview question made me feel worse about myself.

 Another very startling connection I made with this same article was of the suicide of a homosexual boy after his roommate videotaped his sexual encounter and streamed it on YouTube. This type of action is volatile and completely wrong in every way,  and it supports the thought that no matter how "popularity" (as Juhasz states) has affected our lives, it is the wrong way to govern our culture's most popular videos. The most popular videos are at times the most funny, but are often the most humiliating and detrimental. Although this connection I personally made is a frightening one, it often happens entirely too much and shows specifically what individuals are capable of doing.

 The main thing I got out of the Learning From YouTube YouTours was that watching that many videos makes me completely agree with Juhasz in that it is a complete waste of time. Don't get me wrong, identifying the influence YouTube imparts on our lives is extremely valuable and has its merit, but I found myself being happy when my hour of watching videos was over (similar to many of you I'm sure). I always thought that YouTube did nothing but connect people and communities, but after seeing so many videos I realized that it is nothing but a mess that returns the production, consumption, and meaning to the individual-isolating them, judging them, and deeming them "most viewed" or "bad".

Wharton Radio 1

My younger sister always makes fun of me because I like to listen to NPR while I drive. She thinks NPR is for old people and cannot fathom why I would prefer to listen to the news instead of music. What I like about news radio is the fact that I can be caught up on current events while I’m doing something else. To read a newspaper, in print or online, takes much more effort than listening to a radio broadcast while driving, studying, or sunbathing. I never feel as if there are enough hours in the day to accomplish all that I would like to, and listening to the radio allows me to do (at least) two things at once. The enabling of multitasking is something I particularly appreciate about radio, something that makes it one of my favorite forms of media, and the reason I chose this particular week to do the lead blog-post.

The pieces by Bathrick, Kaplan, and Tacchi made me consider radio as a form of mediation in ways I’d never pondered. The similarities in the usage of radio music in Israel and Nazi Germany to develop a national sentiment were particularly striking. For example, in “Engineering National time on Israeli Radio,” Kaplan “examine(s) how the growing use of music programming presents new ways for engineering national identification,” (Kaplan, 313), while in “The Nazi Wunschkonzert,” Bathrick looks at “the use of light entertainment in an attempt to bind together the Volksgemeinchaft, the community of the Volk or the people as they called it, into one big happy family,” (Bathrick, 1). In two very distinct communities, music broadcasts have been used in strikingly similar ways.

In both Nazi Germany and Israel, radio music has been used to heighten collective feelings in times of turmoil or celebration, even if the particular songs do not explicitly relate to the events in lyric or intent. Kaplan describes radio stations in Israel as using “musical mood enhancement to engineer national sentiments,” (Kaplan, 319), and Bathrick writes that the point of wunschkonzert was to “provide a mix of high and low culture which would bring together war front and home front, old and young…into a feel-good version of the Reich as a national family…the mood (my emphasis) was one of sentimentality, domesticity…which was meant to replace the latent violence and heroicized sensation of the Nazi public sphere,” (Bathrick, 2). I found it interesting and eye-opening that without explicit political dialogue, music broadcasting has been utilized by diverse nations to enhance the moods, reactions, and feelings of their citizens as a collective entity.

Reading these two articles got me thinking: but does this situation of mood enhancement occur via radio music in my life, as a citizen in the modern day United States? I would have to say that radio does still act to enhance our moods, predominantly during the Christmas season. While all American citizens do not celebrate Christmas, it seems like the majority of radio stations begin playing Christmas music on or around Thanksgiving Day. Although Christmas is only a single day out of the year, the Christmas season extends for upwards of two months, in large part due to radio broadcasts that inspire us to “get in the holiday spirit.” In this way, radio music broadcast is also being “used as a marker of time,” which Tacchi discusses in her piece (Tacchi, 242).

Finally, on the topic of Tacchi’s article, I want to discuss how unlike the other articles, Tacchi highlights how radio music broadcast can also serve to isolate certain individuals from their communities. In her piece, Tacchi interviews a British woman by the name of Trisha who expresses that her passion for her favorite radio station “causes conflict between (her and her husband) sometimes.” She states, “because I mean, he’s into cricket and football and my sons are as well and so I’m on my own regarding my music, I suppose that’s why I’ve taken it on board as being a friend as well as because I sometimes feel isolated,” (Tacchi, 253). This is similar to how I feel when I chose to play NPR in the car; my sister enjoys listening to the popular radio stations, as these are what our peers listen to, and what generates conversation and interaction in our particular young-adult community. By choosing to listen to NPR, I am somewhat isolating myself from my pop-music playing peers in my hometown.

Overall, I found it eye-opening to read about how influential radio music can be for both setting a national mood as well as isolating an individual from her immediate community. It was equally fascinating to reflect upon the observations presented in the three articles and then apply them to my own nation and personal experiences. In section, I would like to discuss further how the usage of radio music broadcast for national mood setting is able to transcend time and recent advancements in technology and media broadcasting. Will radio in general continue to have such a powerful influence in the future? Not pertaining to technological advancement, will radio music continue to set national, all-encompassing moods as our national communities continue to globalize and diversify? I.e. do these themes of mood setting play off of the relative homogeneity of said-communities?

-Amy Wharton 

Gergen Newspapers 1

Benedict Anderson’s most convincing argument for the rise of Nationalism and, therefore, “imagined communities,” is the dissemination of print media in regional vernaculars as a result of print-capitalism. As Anderson writes, a critical step in the process of creating national communities was the fragmentation of the sacred languages. As these languages fragmented and mechanical printing evolved, the explosion of print media in the vernacular “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to themselves, in profoundly new ways” (Anderson, 36). Mark Allen Peterson’s article focuses on this commonality of language as a first step in placing an individual within a larger social group. The first step in either taking or reading a newspaper in New Delhi is finding a relatable “broad language niche” (Peterson, 176). Regardless of the type of news an individual is interested in, each person is first and foremost identified as a member of a particular language group. From there, the paper can take on any number of characteristics regarding social class, political leanings, level of intelligence, etc. Essentially, the newspaper is both an emblem of social standing and a tool of social awareness.

            I thought one of the more interesting comparisons between the two articles was how the act of reading the paper was performed. Anderson refers to the paper as being performed in “silent privacy, in the lair of the skull” (Anderson, 35). He goes on to say that while an individual is reading the paper alone, he is acutely aware of millions of others that are doing the same thing. To be reading alone, but simultaneously aware of millions of others is a true “imagined” community. However, this is completely different than Peterson’s description of the role of newspapers in New Delhi. In New Delhi the act of reading the newspaper is a social act. Newspapers are read, talked about, and traded. I would argue that based on the information in Peterson’s article, there is a tangible social network surrounding the taking and reading of newspapers in New Delhi. As Peterson writes, “The newspapers one takes must be chosen carefully because they enter into the texture of daily life” (Peterson, 169).

            After reading both of these articles I realized that I have never considered myself part of an imagined community of millions while reading the newspaper. However, I do agree with both Anderson and Peterson that the newspaper, whether it is in print or online, is a valuable tool for increasing one’s own social awareness. And to a lesser degree, I think the newspaper can still say something about the individual. For instance, if I saw two people sitting side-by-side, one reading the Wall Street Journal, and the other reading USA Today, I would be inclined to think the person reading the Wall Street Journal was at least somewhat more knowledgeable.

-Daniel Gergen 

Katzki Mediation 1

I recently embarked (and made it through) a road trip across the country with my boyfriend,  and during this trip, we went to Yellowstone National Park.  On the way to Yellowstone, right off of the freeway, we came across “Yellowstone Bear World;” a business predicated on creating a hyperreality, in which bears roamed free and the onlookers in their cars could interact with them as they drove through… with their windows closed.  The reality is that these bears are trained and, most importantly, tamed and pretty much harmless.  “Bear World” was advertised as an experience with real bears; real wildlife.  The bears were very real, and I was definitely there, but I cannot say that it felt authentic.  They were real bears, deer, wolves, and moose, but the experience was created and replicated for the many visitors.  In relation to the authenticity of Yellowstone National Park, which has a presence in time and space, this replica of the wildlife in the park intensifies the experience mediating between the consumer/onlooker and the idea of Yellowstone National Park.  I encountered three iterations of the National Park: (1) Yellowstone Bear World, (2) Yellowstone National Park, (3) Jellystone Park.  The last is of little consequence, but Yogi Bear, the show about the cartoon bear, references Yellowstone Park using the name Jellystone.  There is a chain of campgrounds, one of which I stayed at during my trip. 
Yellowstone National Park is the most authentic of the three as it  is the actual, as the original Mona Lisa is to a print of the Mona Lisa.

I wrote a paper for another class about what Benjamin calls “Aura,” and I don’t mean to double dip, but it’s very applicable:
    Walter Benjamin aims to renounce mechanical reproductions as authentic art because they have no aura, or, uniqueness.  This uniqueness, he postulates is a compilation of characteristics that produce a kind of essence that is the aura.  In order for art to have an aura, it must have an aspect of humanity rather than merely of an apparatus such as photography or film cameras: “For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 219)  If the lens can produce something that the eye cannot, it cannot therefore have aura because it lacks the aspect of humanity.
    Benjamin’s explains that another element of aura is that of the passage of time that can place art in history:
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.  The unique existence of work of art determined by history to which it was subject to throughout the time of its existence.  This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.  The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the origin.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 220)
A piece of art’s aura, in this case can be derived from its experiences and the distance that creates between the observer and the piece of art itself.  One can be three feet away from a piece of art and still experience the distance of time and be in awe of that distance.  This distance, this awe, is the essence of aura, as it applies to historical works of art, it also applies to nature:  “The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones.  We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 222)
    The problem with mechanical reproduction is the proximity it allows the observer to enjoy.  The closeness of a reproduction thus is that the reproduction affects not only the experience of the replica, but depreciates the original; the authentic as well. “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 221)
    Benjamin posits that people are becoming more interested in bringing objects closer and thus eliminating the distance that allows for art to have aura: “The desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.  Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 223)
    By bringing objects closer and erasing their historical and spatial context through mechanical reproduction, something is being eliminated and that is the aura.  To reproduce a piece of art is to diminish its historical importance and therefore its aura:
“And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.  One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 221)
Aura, in this quotation, is defined by what is lacking in reproduction, rather than something that manifested itself originally in authentic art.  The question that Benjamin is asking is new in the time of its publication, as silent and sound film as well as photography were becoming increasingly prevalent, as well as politicized, but these issues remain important as art becomes more easily reproducible.  The reproducibility of art through mechanical reproduction creates a situation in which brings situations closer and more uniform:
“The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944, 126)
    Benjamin takes issue with these highly reproducible forms of art, which he argues, do not have an original, and therefore no authenticity, at all:
“For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it.  The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor.  However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public.  Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.”  (Benjamin, 1936, 229)
The aura, as explicated in this passage, is something that creates an interaction between arts and the observer that has continuity and specificity that allows the artwork to emanate originality, which no replica can stand in lieu of. 
    Aura is a quality that is erased by mechanical reproduction and the loss of the original, and therefore authenticity.  The term authenticity is comprised of a specific place and time in history that a piece of art occupies, and this specificity allows for a distance between art and the observer that mechanical reproduction aims to bridge through mechanical reproduction.  Aura is the essence of originality, specificity, and authenticity in art.

In regards to the two other articles:

I found it interesting how cinema is used as a means of creating and as a representation of culture in rural India.  The dynamic between these two aspects of media is well defined in the article, and while reading it, I got a sense of how cinema is a means of self-definition, representation, as well as a conversation in itself.  By this I mean that these films interact with each other as well, in that they become blurred into each other as the people in the community reference cinema as a whole, not often knowing what film a saying or quotation originated from. 


The article about moving on and events like 9/11 was enjoyable to read and very convincing, but I was left at the end wanted a solution for the diagnosis that he provided.  Yes, we are overwhelmed with media, and therefore are moved deeply and then move on in rapid succession, but, so what?  What does this mean in the way of reform?  This seems like a more recent iteration of Benjamin’s work, or maybe an extension of it.  Both pieces are cynical and aim to point a finger at apparatus “art” for desensitizing us, but does that mean that there is no enjoyment in it.  There a cornucopia of options, choices, directions to look to see the next thing (to move on), but maybe that just means we have to learn how to decide more often and more concretely. 

Bibliography: 
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Print.
Original Publication Date:  1936

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New Tork: Social Studies Association, 1944.