Walter Benjamin on moblogging
February 17th, 2006
Originally uploaded by stilleben.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility Walter Benjamin writes on the film camera that “with the close up space expands, with slow motion movement is extended. The enlargement….reveals entirely new structural formations. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones.” Once again it seems reasonable to pull out Benjamin, and use his essay to interpret something new - as have been done so many times before - perhaps to many times, but so be it.
What the film camera were for moving images and art, I would say that the camera phone is for everyday life. Everyday life – if we ignore the structural parts – is just as slippery as water, almost impossible to grasp in its mundane nitty-grittiness. But with the ubiquity of camera phones in everyday life and practices of moblogging, we now have a technology to expand the space and time of mundane situations. What this technology and the relations it, without a doubt creates, will come to mean for the structure and situational character of everyday life we will have to see.
