The Blog
Entry #5 - The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility; Part 1
02/17/2025This week I began reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. There is a lot of theory involved so if you haven’t read it this entry might not make a lot of sense. After reading sections I-IV, I found that Benjamin’s work very much applies to the ongoing removal of the Third Place in society through the means of social media.
Benjamin writes that even the most perfect reproductions are lacking the unique quality of being in the here and now. Similar to reproduced art is unable to capture this quality, the artificial reproduction of community on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. these platforms also lack the authenticity of being in a particular space, at a particular time, with particular people face to face. In the Third Place, the base is often owned by a member of the community found there or even communally owned. In both cases, this is usually someone of the Proletariat, meaning they have similar, if not the same amount of control over the means of production as their fellow Proletariat community members. However, this is not the case with most major social media platforms. Often, this ownership role is filled by a member of the Bourgeoisie while the majority of their users are Proletariat. This dynamic of allowing a member of the ruling class to control the Base of a community also allows them to exploit that community’s superstructure, as well as form it to their will. This could be in the form of selling user data, using users’ output to train AI models, and/or choosing to police certain aspects of their platform in a way that maintains the status quo. I hope to continue to reflect on this concept as I read further; specifically on social media as a tool of production. When that happens, I will make another blog post and expand upon this.