A.O. 9/22/16: Aura and Engagement

So I have a sort of fascination with Benjamin's idea of aura and originality because it was such an interesting concept that I had encountered before, but never quite seen put into words.

In thinking about aura though, I wondered how much does aura matter to one’s critical engagement of a work? Are the physical pages of a book necessary to properly engage with it? Does music from an MP3 player pale in comparison to going to see the band in person? How much does film affect the analysis of a production in comparison to that of a play? It’s just to think about but I also wonder if it’s really necessary in respect to an individual’s interest.

For example, there’s the obvious aura difference in holding a physical book vs having a pdf of a text on your laptop (or a tablet if you’re really trendy), but if you just need to see the words of the text clearly, does it really matter whether through pages or pixels? Here, aura seems to be rather unimportant.

Or how about music. Again, there’s an obvious distance between going to Youtube and going to a pop concert but here is where I would like to propose a different way that aura changes the experience. In listening to a song on Youtube, audio can be cleaner and free of extra noise, but at concerts there’s the band, and thousands of screaming fans. In this case, you are in fact closer to an original (unless you want to count the first time they play the song as an original but I digress), but now there’s fans changing how well you can hear the music. and, if you are this type of person, you may be swept away with the atmosphere of it that you more focused on the festivities rather than the actual song. In this case, aura is important in that it has the capacity distract you from proper engagement with the work.

In the end, I don’t know. These examples are more so based in my experience, but other people can feel vastly different. Perhaps someone really can’t engage with something unless there are physically holding it, or there may be people who do go to concerts and will sit there and just listen to music. What do you guys think? Is aura an important facet of your engagement experience?