The Information Bomb
Paul Virilio
Publisher: Verso Books, London, 2000
Hardcover, 145 pages
ISBN: 1859843697

"No one can say what will be 'real' for people when the wars which are now beginning come to an end."
Werner Heisenberg

This book relates in one aspect to my work as Virilio makes quite a number of critical remarks about telepresence.

p. 9 "We are not seing an end of history, but an end of geography."
For the pentagon the global is interior and finite. Local is exterior, the periphery.

p. 16 " ... globalitarian transfromation [...] which extraverts localness, all localness."

p. 12. CNN - tele surveillance (live and worldwide)

p.13 Creating a worldtime. Radiomap is local time.
shift from real spacce of geopolitics to "real time" of chronopolitics?

Globalisation:
a) reduction of distance, temporal compression
b) spread of tele-surveillance

Bachelard: "The destiny of every image is enlargement."

p. 14 A general visualisation (microscope, telescope, satellite) turn inside and ouside around. Results in virtualisation and amplification of optical density of the real world.

p. 16: TV is a domestic telescope

p. 18: Webcams: multiple points of view, beyond "as far as the eye can see"

p. 39 "And with the access to the information superhighways get to become more commonplace, an increase in the number of armchair-travellers - those distant offshots of the silent reader - is het to come. They alone will suffer the full range of communication disturbances acquired over the recent centuries of technology."

p. 40-41 Virilio states, similar to Jung, that people refuse to grow up. "dangerous behaviour is trying to overcome own impotence."
Witold Gombrowicz

p.44 advertising is totalitarian

p. 46 "War, commerce, piracy - all in one, inseperable" Goethe, Faust
Just what Fuller said!

p. 66: "Active (wave) optics which revolutionises the traditional passive (geometric) optics of the era of Galileos' telescope as though the loss of the horizon of geographical perspective necessitated the establishment of a substitute horizon - the artivicial horizon of a screen or monitor capable of permanentely displaying the preponderance of the media perspective, the relief of the 'tele-present' event taking precedence over the three dimensions of the volume of the objects or places here present.

p. 72: "Technological accelleration initially brought about a transference from writing to speech - from the letter and the book to the telephone and the radio. Today it is the spoken word which is logically withering away before the instantaneity of the real-time image. With the spread of illiteracy,the era of silent microphones and the mute telephones open before on us."

"... we may now envisage planetary life becoming progressively a story without words, a silent cinema, an autherless novel, ..."

"We shall shortly have nothing to say to each other, or really the time to say it. - and above all, we shall no longer know how to go about listening to or say something, just as we no longer know how to write, in spite of the fax revolution which was allegedley going to give letter-writing a new lease of life."

p. 122 "Here no longer exists - everything is now!"