Yesterday we looked at the two scholars; Eduardo Navas and Walter Benjamin, who helped us to understand the idea of sampling, remaking and remixing original artefacts such as art, film and music. I was particularly interested in Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura can which was written in an unpublished report on one of his hashish experiments, dated March 1930: “First, genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine.” This assertion contrasts sharply with the common understanding of Benjamin’s aura as a primarily aesthetic category—as shorthand for the particular qualities of traditional art that he observed waning in modernity, associated with the singular status of the artwork, its authority, authenticity, and unattainability, epitomized by the idea of beautiful semblance. On that understanding, aura is defined in antithetical relation to the productive forces that have been rendering it socially obsolete: technological reproducibility, epitomized by film, and the masses, the violently contested subject/object of political and military mobilization (Hansen, 2008).

We understood this buy relating this concept to people trying to capture ‘aura’ via social media or photos, however you will only ever capture a fraction of the ‘aura’ not what it looked, felt, smelt and sounded like. Although social media is argued that it is becoming and more authentic mode of communication. A tweet, Facebook post or Instagram pic very much adds to peoples perception of one another and can be considered part of our ‘aura’.