Society today has rapidly changed to an unknown world with all the technology that has recently been blossoming. After reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", by Walter Benjamin, I realized how aura of the artwork truly is lost when surfing the Internet. When previously going on the Internet and completing research projects on artists and their works, I thought that the convenience of galleries on-line helped people to view art more easily and somehow appreciate it more. I agree with Benjamin when he states how "mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new" (77). I believe that aura is honestly lost because of reproduction of paintings. Nowadays anybody can go on their computers and Internet and view whatever they want to. Why go to a museum and study a painting when you can sit on a chair and see it on your monitor? Because of the how easily accessible the Internet is to people today, it causes people to lose the sense of how beautiful the artwork is and just see it as check your e-mail. I believe that the Internet imposes the population to perceive objects in another way. With this, technology produces new forms of art that are not diminished by their lack of aura, just continue to be the same way they have always been. It tends to exemplify how the aura is fading since nowadays people are becoming lethargic and not caring for real artwork.
             As stated in Benjamin's essay, "one might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art... One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence" (79). I believe this is accurately correct. By replication of artwork, one tends to ...