On Robert Fitterman's “Replacing References to Photography with References to the Web in Vilém Flusser's ‘Towards a Philosophy of Photography’ (1983)”

This essay attempts to do two things which is really one thing. Flusser speaks eloquently about the use apparatuses and our own roles as users who “process and repurpose images and text.” In this essay, Robert Fitterman has taken Flusser at his word and plagiarized or repurposed his own text. But, he has also changed the photography references to Internet references. By doing so, he hopes this essay re-enacts Flusser's own articulation of how tools function in a post-industrial society.The category basic to industrial society is work: tools and machines work by tearing objects from the natural world and informing them, i.e. changing the world. But apparatuses do not work in this sense. Their intention is not to change the world, but to change the meaning of the world. Their intention is symbolic.Fitterman's aim, also, is to draw a parallel between Flusser's focus on the invention of photography as a dramatic shift in the way we process information, to the ways in which we process information today via the web

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