tweets in the age of digital reproduction ☼☀☼

but digitization is not mechanization, and duplication within this space is not autonomy. mechanically produced objects begin as identical and are placed in the world as unique entities with individual existence; their origin may be cheap, and as benjamin argues, perhaps that does constrains their aura to the time that will accumulate on them and not their mere existence. but a digital object appears across a multiplicity of screens both at once /and forever/. these entities are not individually manipulatable, which is to say they do not exist in multiples that can accumulate their singular times and histories and auras, but as a single form. in this space, a copy is not a manipulation, it is a recreation. like mitosis, a copy has the capacity for individual mutation but does not intrinsically affect its parent. a retweet of information is not a duplication nor a shift in scale; a retweet impacts the structural bridge of a networked idea, not the intrinsic idea itself. although these digital entities are accessible from any place, by multiple people, at once- and even though these interactions may happen simultaneously- they are singular. they exist both inside of and outside of this accumulated time; they have auras.