journal of digital research & publishing - The Sydney eScholarship ...

1 P M J O U R N A L O F D I G I T A L R ESEARCH & P UBLISHING
are presented by Walter when he writes: ‘The removal of the object from its shell, the
fragmentation of the aura, is the signature of perception whose sensitivity has so grown
that by means of reproduction it defeats even the unique” (Benjamin 1972 p. 209). Walter,
through describing photography in his essay, here recognises that something of the ‘aura’ of
an object is lost when it is copied into a photograph. In the same way, something in actuality
is lost when it is reproduced on the internet. This is something that may detrimental to
actuality if the reception of the online copy is able to change the real world. More likely
it’s a technological trade­off that is a natural outcome of a paradigm shift in information
collation (Christen 2005).
The Plane and the Fold as parallels
The idea that the folds of actuality are replicated in the plane of the digital world can
dissolve the fear of creating copies that only partially represent the world. If the concept
of the fold is applied to the world and all things in the world are connected, the idea
of the internet can be seen as a plane that lies on top of the folded page (to describe it
pragmatically), then digital culture can be considered to be a representation of the entirety
of actuality. In forming an indent created by the fold that connects to all things, the indent
can similarly be considered a representation of all things in the digital world and in the
actual world.
In considering the digital world to be a plane, rather than a fold, we are no longer faced
with the problem of losing a sense of ourselves when we consider the impact of the internet.
In fact it may even lead to a heightened sense of the self in the world: ‘...the impact of new
media may bring a change in one’s sense of one’s own place no less than of the place of the
things around one’ (Malpas 2008, p. 23). The key to the copy not being a danger or a threat
to the sanctity of the original, ie. the actual world, is that “...the virtual reproduction, so
long as it is evident as virtual, does not masquerade as the real thing” (Malpas 2008, p.
18). Social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, do offer replicas to
the actual world, but they do not pretend to be the relationship between people. Rather,
they offer an opportunity for something that exists in actuality to be replicated online for
convenience and to defeat the material and spatial barriers that may arise in the real world.
The evidence for this can be found in the way in which the interaction it offers replicates
what already exists in the world – such as becoming a fan of a band, or commenting on the
activity of friends.
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