"painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality” (235). This respect for distance common to both natural perception and painting is overturned by the new technologies of mass reproduction, particularly photography and film. Cameraman, whom Benjamin compares to a surgeon, “penetrates deeply into its [reality] web” (237); his camera zooms in in order to “pray an object from its shell” (225). With its new mobility, glorified in such films as Dziga Vertov’s “A Man with the Movie Camera,” the camera can be anywhere, and, with its superhuman vision, it can obtain a close-up of any object. These close-ups, writes Benjamin, satisfy the desires of the masses “to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,” “to get hold of an object at very close range” (225). Along with disregarding the scale, the unique locations of the objects are discarded as well as their photographs brought together within a single picture magazine or a film newsreel, the forms which fit in with the demand of mass democratic society for “the universal equality of things.”
…
What may be radically new in electronic telecommunication, in contrast to film, is that it can function as a two-way communication. Not only the user can immediately obtain images of various locations, bringing them together with a single electronic screen, but, via telepresence, she can also be “present” in these locations. In other words, she can affect change on material reality over physical distance in real time. In this way, electronic communication makes instantaneous not only the process by which objects are turned into signs but also the reverse process — manipulation of objects through these signs. [7]"

Film/Telecommunication - Benjamin/Virilio

Distance and Aura, by Lev Manovich