February 2009

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• Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Humanities, Life Writing

  Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing

  25.02.09 | Permalink | Comments Off on Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing

  In this first decade of the twenty-first century we are caught up in the midst of a technological shift of the kind that Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, attributed to the increasing popularity of photography in the early twentieth century. The essence of that change was the unprecedented capacity to create infinitely reproducible multiple copies. For the first time the idea of the primacy of the singular work of art was seriously open to question. ‘The history of every art form,’ writes Benjamin, ‘shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, a new art form’. Photography initiated a change that Benjamin recognised as being as profound in its impact on people’s lives as the introduction of the printing press.

about

Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity to migration and human rights. His forthcoming book is Open Scholarship in the Humanities (2023, with Lydia Hearn). From 2016–21 he was director of the Edith Cowan Centre for Global Issues, and in 2021–2022 leader of ECU’s university-wide Society and Culture research theme. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, and has given over one hundred keynote, plenary and invited talks in more than twenty countries. Click here for full Profile

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