The text brings up the very interesting and challenging question of "what visions of the future we formulate in different cultural forms" (art, literature, film, gaming...)

It distinguishes between Utopian and Dystopian visions of the future (Utopian:envision of maximum perfection. Dystopian: extreme negative projection).

As you have read, representational technologies tend to be evaluated as highly dangerous. Since they directly target our senses of perception, they enhance the danger of "making the simulation-world feel more real than the real world/ _hyper-reality_" and collapsing our sense of judgment.

Think about movies, novels, comics... where technology and the future have been represented (those presented on the text are excluded).

1. Describe what "original/ innovative" technologies were presented and (2) how humans related to that way of organizing the world.
3. Tell me if you think the media produced an Utopian or Dystopian representation of technology.

Make a post answering to those questions:

1. In this second part of the essay we see a better description of how the classical Aura gets broken when the "ritual value" of the work of art diminishes and its "exhibition value" increases (in the case of Photography, because of being used as an evidence of reality).

Give me an example of Photography used for its ritual-value, versus the same medium being used for its exhibition value.
Attach 2 images as examples and briefly comment them.

2. When examining film, Benjamin makes a very interesting point: although we think, as audience, that we are identifying ourselves with "the actor", actually we are identifying ourselves with the camera, to be more accurate: we identify ourselves with the editing of the camera shots, that become our eyes, witnessing the story.
Tell me an example of a movie-scene that you remember because of the camera shot or the way the perception of time was altered though the editing.

3. Name some other point in Benjamin's theory about Film that you find relevant.