ARC 597 | On Speed Situated Technologies Intellectual Domain Seminar, Fall 2014

In Virilio’s The administration of Fear, there is this overarching idea that technology and the loss of physical face to face communication is creating a society that has lost touch with itself.  He talks about this process of “derealization”.  He says that, “We have lost the relationship to the material world in favor of the world of electromagnetic waves.”  I wonder if this is a bit on the paranoid side.  While Virilio makes several interesting points, specifically about the Russian’s missile retaliation system, I question that the increase in technology and the ability to be across from the globe from the person you are talking to has really diminished people’s ability to make conscious decisions.  He also talks about how, “a relationship to places and reality is disappearing, dissolving, evaporating.”  I think that as technology progresses and allows us to do more and begin to inhabit the virtual world, I do not believe that we will lose what makes us human.  We will still have the effects of the culture and place in which we grew up.  Increase use in technology does not make the physical world just stop.