From Actors to YouTubers: Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Digital Authenticity

Actors and Streamers. AI art

Introduction

In his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin described how modern technologies were transforming art and representation. One of his most insightful observations was the difference between the theatrical actor, who presents himself physically before an audience, and the film actor, whose words and gestures are fragmented by the camera and then reassembled. Half a century later, Jean Baudrillard deepened this analysis in Simulacra and Simulation (1981/1994), arguing that images no longer represent reality but generate it. Both thinkers offer key insights for understanding the new figures of the digital age—YouTubers, TikTokers, and streamers—who operate in a realm where performance is both intimate and mediated, spontaneous and staged.

Stage and Screen

Benjamin considered the stage as the place of presence. The theatrical actor addresses the audience directly, and this unique encounter gives rise to the aura. Cinema changes everything. The performer no longer faces the spectator but the camera lens; the performance is broken down into shots and takes, which are then assembled in editing. The audience ceases to identify with the actor and adopts the perspective of the apparatus: “Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing” (Benjamin, 1969/1935, p. 229).

Pirandello precisely described the estrangement resulting from this: “The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself… his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates” (cited in Benjamin, 1969/1935, p. 231). The aura, linked to presence, does not survive the mediation of the camera. What endures is a reproducible image, which over time feeds the cult of the movie star.

Representation and Simulation

Baudrillard provides a language to describe this transformation. Representation still presupposes a link to the real. Simulation breaks that bond: signs no longer reflect the world; they produce it. The edited film role is not merely the record of a performance; it becomes an autonomous construct, an effect of reality.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard distinguishes four phases of the image: reflecting reality, deforming it, masking its absence, and finally becoming pure simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 6). Cinema, especially in Benjamin’s description, already ventures into these latter phases. The actor does not offer a character but a concatenation of signs reinforced by advertising and fandom, which produce the hyperreality of stardom.

Digital Performers and “Curated Authenticity”

What happens, then, with today's digital creators? Their situation inherits traits from both traditions. Streamers recreate a sense of immediacy, evoking the direct contact of the theatrical actor with the audience. At the same time, their content passes through cameras, microphones, and editing, as in cinema. But there is a new decisive agent: the algorithm, which acts as an invisible editor and selects which pieces get viewed, recombining visibility based on the attention they capture.

What distinguishes these figures is not the performance itself but the constant work of producing what we might call a curated authenticity. The vlog presented as casual, the podcast with a relaxed tone, or the TikTok clip that seems improvised are, in reality, the result of rehearsal, editing, and algorithmic tuning. The effect is not Benjamin’s aura but its simulation: a calculated intimacy that aims to appear spontaneous.

There are many examples, from videos where a creator pretends to have turned on the camera “by accident,” to live streams that include pauses and rehearsed awkwardness. The audience perceives closeness precisely in those gestures, designed to convey naturalness.

Reconsidered Alienation

Benjamin described alienation as the exile of the actor from his own presence, dissolved in images. In today's digital economy, that alienation is deeper. Not only does the aura disappear: the notion of a private self also erodes. Life itself becomes raw material for clips, stories, and broadcasts. Numbers—likes, views, followers—become the measure of authenticity and symbolic value.

What seems like a recovery of the aura is, in reality, its staged substitute. The pressure is to live permanently as content, unable to step out of one’s own role. In this sense, the algorithm not only distributes videos: it prescribes lifestyles, defines which forms of intimacy are visible and which remain in the shadows.

Conclusion

Benjamin’s distinction between theater and cinema traced the decline of the aura; Baudrillard diagnosed the triumph of simulation. The new digital performer stands at the crossroads: half stage, half screen, but ultimately operating in hyperreality. What they offer is not presence but its imitation—a packaged authenticity optimized for circulation.

The irony is evident. The aura, which Benjamin believed irretrievable, returns today in the form of simulacrum. And the audience, by consuming that manufactured authenticity, not only accepts it: they take it as a model of what it means to be “real.”

References

• Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981).
• Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (M. W. Jennings, B. Doherty, & T. Y. Levin, Eds.; E. Jephcott et al., Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1935).
• Pirandello, L. (2001). Shoot! (Si Gira) (C. Sugden, Trans.). Eridanos Press. (Original work published 1915).