Niels Werber "Current German Media-Theory and their Ancestors: Benjamin and Brecht" (2003)

In 1972, Jean Baudrillard published his “Requiem of the media”, actually intoning his requiescat in pace not to media, but to certain media-theories. At the end of a close examination of German media theoreticians like Walter Benjamin, Berthold Brecht, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Baudrillard states that all these approaches have at least two things in common: a massive overestimation of the social consequences driven by technical possibilities of new media on the one hand and a immense underestimation of the social constraints regulating the utilization of new media on the other hand.