Tom Leach
THE POTENTIAL FOR BENJAMINIAN INTERNET STUDIES
My research focuses on the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, using his concepts and methods to understand the internet and the shifts it has caused in contemporary life and experience. Amongst Benjamin’s most lasting contributions are his studies of modernity, particularly of how technological developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought about major perceptual shifts in the modern subject, with radical aesthetic and political implications. My work primarily adopts and adapts Benjamin’s, ‘updating’ it for contemporary purposes. His work was far-sighted, and, as our current situation is a historical development of his own, I find it still has great explanatory power, with healthy potential for extrapolation and transposition. Specific areas of interest include the aura of internet objects, casting a new look at the impact of information on the communication of experience (as first described in his essay ‘The Storyteller’), and the visual/non-verbal languages and structures of meaning in online cultural spaces. As a young researcher entangled deeply, as Benjamin was, in his subject matter, I hope to offer an involved perspective that has perhaps not yet found its way into established academic discourse. I maintain that studies of the internet, and the culture that has developed in and around it, are not just vital for understanding the present situation – they offer key insight into an emerging subject who will have grown up on the internet, and the political and cultural future they/we may engender.