Freeze Frame. Week 50: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gassett

Week 50 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brings us to three mid-20th-century thinkers wrestling with art, media, and the modern world: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gasset.

I begin with Susan Sontag’s famous essay “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography. Writing in 1972, she asks how photography changes our relationship to memory and experience. At the time, photographs were printed objects. We saved them in albums, books, or wallets. Today we carry thousands in our pockets. If photographs once captured moments, now they seem to overwhelm them.

Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” pushes this further, asking what happens to art when it can be endlessly copied. Photography and film, he argues, transform not just art but perception itself.

Finally, José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses explores the rise of “mass-man”—a culture where opinions are everywhere but the pursuit of truth is optional.

Taken together, these essays were more uncomfortable than I expected: the problems of our modern media world may have been visible long before smartphones, if only we'd paid attention.

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