The most important concept  that, if we take away anything from Benjamin’s essay, we should grasp is the concept of aura. There are two reasons for the significance of this concept: first, because it is crucial to understand how the works of art lose their aesthetic value. Second, because we can still sense this articulation of the aura in relation to our media environment today. The aura for Benjamin is simply the quality integral to an artwork that cannot be  communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques – such as photography. Think, for instance, of the Original Mona Liza in the Louvre and a photography of it in your study. The aura in this case is that stuff that the original Mona Liza has that its photographic reproduction hung on the wall of your study, no matter how precise in its replication, doesn’t have. 

  At the present time, with the rise of social media platforms, the concept of the aura still has to do with the works of art in one way or another. For Instance, in our relation to famous works of art or famous painting, the aura becomes or takes the form of ‘ popular wisdom‘. People would say: ‘when you go to the Louvre or Van Gogh museum, try to look and experience the paintings instead of just taking a picture of it.’This is exactly what Benjamin tries to convey in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he writes: “to follow with the eye – while resting on a summer afternoon – a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of branch(p:23). To take this to popular contemporary discourse, we can say that watching a concert  with a cellphone in your hand, trying to record and share the moment on social media is less aura than living it with all your senses. At this point, we might be identifying with what Benjamin is saying about aura and agreeing that, indeed, even nowadays we are losing the aura of art.