Page 13 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.

Foreword

In the first and second decade of the 21st Century, mass culture strongly

expanded thanks to new hardware and software, which make above all the
Internet tick. Nonetheless, great improvements such as high definition dis-
plays, the accessibility of television programmes and the growing practises
of small audio-visual productions made possible by cheap and high quality
equipment, have had their own impact. What used to be just the mass re-
production of goods and aesthetic products is currently becoming the mass
production of roles and positions of participation in a vast stream of social,
scientific, cultural, political and media communication. Virtually everyone
can have their part in segmented exchanges on all imaginable levels of in-
teractions of texts, pictures, movies, gestures, music, statements and some-
times even new ideas. How much this expanded and multiplying activity,
enabled by technology, which includes the “hidden” software, qualifies as
a new leap or revolution with far-reaching effects in the social reality can
be established only in retrospect. Still, no matter whether we have to deal
here with, just an expanded pre-existent mass culture or some new mode
of social relationships, there are many visible consequences for which prop-
er names and notions are on the way to be invented. Moreover, this holds
true for a critical analysis, which aims at a vision of emancipation as well as
for the analysis, which aims at nothing since the practice of emancipation
is reduced to just gestures of subversion, breaks, shocks, discontinuities or
strategies of inflating illusions of fragmented realities. Illusionary expecta-

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