Sydney Demonstration with ALP Leaders including Tom Uren and Neville Wran

 

Tree Scape in Marrickville

 

Walter Benjamin

Abstract This essay is primarily concerned with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the newspaper as a media space with reference to privatization of urban space, industrialization of public communication, and mediazation of public space in nineteenth-century Paris. I seek to show how the information industry brought about the fundamental changes in literary practice, intellectual activity, and the formation of a new social subject. I also demonstrate how Benjamin’s rich illustration of the complex dynamics of media space in the nineteenth century largely avoids the shortcomings of oversimplification embedded in the analysis of the bourgeois public sphere. In doing so, I argue Benjamin’s critical analysis that the newspaper provides a systematic framework by which to examine the intersection between the media space and the urban experience in a digital age.

Keywords 

Mediaspace.Phantasmagoria.Urbanspace.Spectacle.Storytelling. Information . Newspaper . Communication . Mediated public sphere

The Phantasmagoria of Urban Space

Between late 1928 and early 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote a short piece for radio, “The Ring of Saturn or Some Remarks on Iron Construction”.1 In this essay, Benjamin gives a description of the work of the French caricaturist and illustrator Grandville (the pseudonym of Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérad). Here, Benjamin provides a detailed description of one of the vignettes, Le pont des planètes, in which Grandville illustrates the adventures of a fantastic little hobgoblin who is trying to find his way around outer space. 

 

Nasa Moon Shot

The Great Wall of China is a barrier fortification in northern China running west-to-east 13,171 miles (21,196 km) from the Jiayuguan Pass (in the west) to the Hushan Mountains in Liaoning Province in the east, ending at the Bohai Gulf. It crosses eleven provinces/municipalities (or ten, according to some authorities) and two autonomous regions (Inner Mongolia and Ningxia). Construction of the wall began in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) under the First Emperor Shi Huangdi (r. 221-210 BCE) and continued over hundreds of years throughout many different dynasties.

The Great Wall in the present day is almost completely the work of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1664 CE) who added the distinctive watchtowers and expanded the length and width of the wall. The now-famous national monument fell into decay following the Ming Dynasty, when the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 CE) took power and expanded the border of China northwards, making the wall obsolete. Restoration and preservation efforts only seriously began in the 1980's CE, and the wall was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 CE.