One of Walter Benjamin’s main points in the introductory parts of The Arcades Project was that technology and techniques contribute to a restructuring of the human sensory system. He wanted to put forth that the forms of mediated reproduction which were emerging in the era of modern industrialism had an impact on the ways in which people organise their perception of the world around them. Benjamin illustrated his point by discussing how cars, trains and aeroplanes transform relations to physical space, as well as how new media such as photography and cinema reformulate previous conceptions of time and space.

Can we apply his concepts to an analysis of contemporary new media? Simon Lindgren in From Flâneur to Web Surfer: Videoblogging, Photo Sharing and Walter Benjamin @ the Web 2.0 in <Transformations explores how Benjamin’s analysis of the nineteenth century culture of consumption might contribute to an understanding of the new communal formations and self-reflexive subjectivities of the internet in the twenty-first century