Paul Virilio’s book, Open Sky opens with a rather glum, though nonetheless true, quote that we discussed briefly in class last week: “Some day the day will come when the day will not come.” This quote, though seemingly bleak, is at the heart of Virilio’s discussion of the ways in which technology is changing—has been changing—our world. Writing in 1997, Virilio is somewhat disturbed by the changes he is witnessing with the advent of the internet, the cell phone, and other technologies that are ubiquitous to society only a decade later.
The similarities between Virilio and Ulmer are noticeable, particularly in the fact that they are both difficult reads. One of the overarching considerations of Open Sky is that current (current during his time and to an even greater degree, during present times) technologies actually have the ability to shape nature. He explains this notion by discussing our concept of time and the way that our understanding of time is changing based on these technologies. This doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all, considering that “time” is a human construct anyway and that it was certainly changed based on technologies such as sundials and, to a greater extent, clocks. Of course, I don’t think Virilio is merely positing that our understanding of the notion of time is changing, but that time itself (if it exists outside of the human mind) is actually changing in some physical way. He discusses this change throughout the book and introduces it in the first chapter, “The Third Interval,” through a discussion of time, space, the speed of light, and through a discussion of a “’generalized arrival’ whereby everything arrives without having to leave” (16). This generalized arrival seems to be most perpetuated through video cameras, first by displaying pictures on a television (arriving in a metaphorical sense to the world on the screen) and now through webcams which allows a person to actually arrive without having ever left. Throughout his book his also talks about teleseminars, which, interestingly enough, most people in our class took part in over the summer during the Serious Games class… part of our class took place over Skype. We arrived in class without ever having to leave our houses. Virilio’s fear, it seems, is that the availability of this kind of technology will eventually eliminate the need to ever leave or arrive and, furthermore, to never have to move.
Our reading of Sherry Turkle was particularly interesting when considering a number of claims that Virilio makes throughout this book. One of the first, when he is discussing the transition of the human environment due to technology, he imagines “an urban environment whereby the image prevails over the thing it is an image of” (19). Though we haven’t exactly made it so far as to prefer the virtual over the real in terms of urban environments (at least in the sense that we’re not all Matrix characters, as far as I know), we’ve certainly moved that way in terms of people. It seems as though people have become taken over my their images, whether these images occur on Facebook or on webcam. Furthermore, images that we see, say, of celebrities are certainly privilidged and preferred over the celebrities themselves. First of all, most of us could never come in contact with them at all. Secondly, as Turkle’s book shows, we prefer this faraway interaction because we don’t have to see things we don’t want to see (for example, our favorite celebrity being rude, etc.). On that note, the people that we’ve come to love (celebrities) aren’t even the real people. Rather than seeing the real person, we’re seeing a Photoshopped image of that person—a particularly telling instance of the image prevailing over the thing it is an image of.
Virilio further discuss our love of the image over the thing it is an image of in his chapter called “From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion” in which he discusses the ways that cybersex may eventually take over real sex (which he seems to equate with marriage and relationships—I’m not sure this is necessarily true anymore, but I think that most people would agree that they should all be lumped together). He writes that “To prefer the virtual being—at some remove—to the real being—close-up—is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to the substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh-and-blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else” (104). I agree with Virilio that this is true in some aspects, but luckily I don’t think that technology is bringing us down quite as fast as he had expected. Though we certainly meet our lovers online, most people use online dating sites to find someone to meet in real life. Though I certainly believe that technology has the ability to negatively impact us (and it has in some ways) I don’t think we’re even close to the time when there will be no more time.
Questions:
Do you think that Virilo’s view of the world will ever exist?
Virilo speaks of an immediate memory. How do websites like Google and Wikipedia utilize this notion?
Do we only have generalized arrivals left?
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