2-5: [CTRL] + C
According to Jussi Parikka, copying is a key cultural operation of both modern media technologies and modernity in general. Although mimesis had been a concern of both renaissance painters and medieval monks manually copying canonical texts by hand, Parikka notes that it was not until Gutenberg's invention of the printing press that mass, machine-afforded copying began to have wider cultural consequences. With Walter Benjamin's classic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," Parikka also recognizes a connection between media technology and the copy[14] - in Benjamin's terms, the reproducibility of film and photography was tied to a kind of mass distribution across space, and in this dissemination, found a kind of democratizing potential in the ability to transcend the limitations of an "auratic" original context. For Parikka, modern day computers also, of course, fit comfortably within this lineage of the copy on practically every layer of their operation. For instance, the basic memory functions of the computer involve "copying in the sense of data being continuously copied between memory registers (from cache memory to core storage..)," just as the ubiquitous copy/paste routine of modern graphic user interfaces (GUIs) has been a staple of personal computing since 1974.[15]
![[14]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-14.jpg){kind=link}
![[15]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-15.jpg){kind=link}
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