“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”

Chuang Tzu quotes (The most significant of China’s early interpreters of Taoism, 389-286 BC)

First of all, the term “authenticity” attracted me, as Benjamin said, after finding the ability to reproduce art works, the importance of authenticity became more highlighted. I wonder if this term is still meaningful in these recent decades or not. What is authenticity now, does it deal with physical aspect of an art work? Of course not, because we are surrounded by the art works which does not exist in a physical form at all. Think about a movie as a favorite example of Benjamin.

Movies are generally in the form of information nowadays, maybe each time we watch one of them we are experiencing a very specific medium of them. Even we go forward to a point which the medium of an art work or any kind of other information is not important at all. Have you ever experienced the situation in which you cannot remember that where exactly you heard about a news report (message)?, whether you watched it in TV, it came by you via email or something in your smartphone or you heard from someone, etc. This is the effect of being surrounded by different source of media.

The human perspective toward any lone object just started to change maybe from the moment which he started to reproduce the art works. The way we look at different object are impressed by all innovation on technologies, meanings and concepts, I think we now have the ability to shift our observation between objective and subjective way of thinking or observing things. It goes without saying that the capability of art works to be reproduced tremendously revolutionized the definition of the art itself. However it is not a very important debate to clarify the definition of art than it was before.

All in all, it seems that the entwined relation between content, medium and message – which all of them can change place with each other by us shifting our way of thinking about them from subjective to objective attitude – is a newly discovered phenomena and we can defrag any content till reaching a very primitive data which may be even nonverbal.