Topic five

LECTURE- This lecture was titled “Why I hate Wikipedia.” The Professor raised some very interesting questions. What is an authorative on the internet? And how do we know the truth?
The problem and the best thing about Wikipedia is that it can be changed and modified by anybody. False information and lies can be placed on Wikipedia and it may take several years for a false article to be corrected properly.
There are several theories about what Truth is.
Correspondence theory- Just the facts and what is observed.
Coherence theory- Does it fit together and make sense?
Performative theory- I do declare.
Social theory- what can we agree on.
TUTORIAL- The task is to answer this question; how do the ideas from Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” apply to contemporary digital media?”
His ideas suggest that there is little original artwork anymore, that there are now different challenges facing art because of the independence of artwork that isn’t original, that popular art is now considered excellent, rather than vice versa.
This applies to contemporary digital media because if Walter Benjamin is correct, than little of this digital media is actually original, that in some way it has been influenced by past works. Very little of contemporary digital media, and probably any other modern art, is authentic and completely original, taking popular ideas from other artwork and combining them.
READING- The reading is called “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, by Jorge Luis Borges. The writer found out about a region called Uqbar, a place that didn’t actually exist in reality, through an Encyclopaedia. By researching more about Uqbar, he found out about an imaginary planet called Orbis Tertius. Hidden works were written about it, showing the creation of animals, insects, new laws, psychology. People that read about this world discovered actual solid artefacts’ that could only come from this planet.
Idealism, if implanted in humankind so that it can not be distinguished between it and reality, will actually affect reality.