Benjamin And Baudrillard Analysis

Red pill or blue pill: between Benjamin and Baudrillard

Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
The Matrix (1999)

On Walter Benjamin's influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction", he argues that mechanical reproduction produces a fundamental change in the nature of art, a change that destroys the artwork's "aura" by removing the context in which art had been related. He suggests that technology creates a new kind of political or revolutionary potential for mass art, whereas such

The reader can disconnect the work of art from its past uses and new combinations can be brought. The liberation of art gains ‘entirely new functions’.
For Benjamin, the original, defined as that something is born out of nothing, is held in the highest esteem. Jean Baudrillard challenges this notion in his book Simulacra and Simulation. By counting backwards from the last copy to the purported ‘original’, Baudrillard finds no “mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept”. One simple example is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The painting is contributed by the following: portraits that were painted before it, the woman herself, breakthroughs in perspective that revolutionized art before the artist.
Back in the modern days, the Internet is a whole collection of a media composed of reproductions. It is a virtual space, which has no original and lacks even a master copy. We, human as the user, offer to put the information inside the space. However web pages do not exist until they are uploaded onto the Internet by the author, and “reproduced” on our computer. Nowadays we can even create our own webpage on the cloud. To look for an original on the Internet is such a hard job since there are somehow no real material base to