This demanding reading asks us to recall Marxism, Freud and an era that predates the current pervasiveness of film. Ironically, it discusses the dilution of art out of context, because it must itself be read out of context.
I think Benjamin would have appreciated Marshall McLuhan’s concept of media as message. He clearly states that during the nineteenth-century debate on whether photography was art, critics ignored the question of whether (and how) photography was instead changing the definition of art itself. Another intellectual of this era, Jean Piaget described children as learning by both assimilation (bringing things into known categories) and accommodation (transforming the definition of categories when assimilation fails). While Piaget’s theory of child development has itself been transformed by later research into a historical relic, it is well worth considering how new technologies go through a similar process, and face the same questions as photography once did. For example, there is considerable debate on whether bloggers are journalists. We would be wise to ask whether the definition of journalism will have to be transformed to accommodate the blog.
I’m less clear on Benjamin’s concept of artifact “auras.” Clearly he’s not using the term in its new age sense and I think perhaps his intent is to describe the context of an art object, maybe something like its Gestalt? If so, he seems to limit his understanding of aura to something that only unique artifacts possess. It would have been interesting to know his thoughts about whether the aura is unique to the object, or is more of an object-observer interaction, created anew with each new person, time, place and reproduction.