9 (52)
inability to speak because there is also a need to temporarily compress the interactivity. The
closed world needs no communications because of the need to be faster which takes the war
wager to the virtual reality, In Virilio’s terms it is better to say instead of virtual reality then the
“accelerated reality” that describes better war machine’s need to speed up the reality. War is
waged about time instead of space in Virilio’s world. (Virilio 2002, 72-80)
Sylvere Lotringer comments how war is changing from the local reality to the screen reality,
“The American military command is… in the process of realizing that war is no longer confined
to warfare.” In a critical moments, trying to understand war, events, destructive force and vio-
lence, Virilio describes what is the ultimate tendency – if we continue on this track of “develop-
ment and progress” - in his understanding of war as images replace all sorts of analyses:
“Thanks to information technology… we are faced with the reconstruction of the phenomenol-
ogy of perception according to the machine. And that is a catastrophic event.” (Virilio 2002, 140-
141)
Terrorism is dependent on information war. It uses the speed of mass communication, so it
needs the media. Terrorist uses the revolution in military affairs based on information war and
the information environment. They will catch the news, and often simultaneously in all time
zones, that means there is only one time zone. Videotape released by the terrorist is more im-
portant than the physical explosion. Hence, multimedia explosions in the media are more impor-
tant in this new war (in which gathering information seems to have no limits). According to the
Virilio’s theory of information war and change in the nature of war, this is because “today there-
fore, the end of deterrence corresponds to the beginning of information war, a conflict where the
superiority of information is more important than the capability to inflict damage”. It means,
“we’re entering a third age of military weaponry… and that’s the weaponry of communication”.
(Virilio 1997, 174-175)
Paul Virilio and his thoughts are penetrating in the contemporary information and military tech-
nologies, and technologies of representation. Virilio sees technology not like most of others only
in positive manner, but tendencies of technology have radical consequences transforming mod-
ern/postmodern war and world. Douglas Kellner has correctly argued that Virilio’s conception of
technology is “missing the empowering and democratizing aspects of new computer and media
technologies. My argument is that his vision of technology is overdetermined by his intense fo-
cus on war and military technology and that this optic drives him to predominantly technophobic
perspectives on technology per se as well as the new technologies of the contemporary era.”
Kellner still recognizes that, “however, it is precisely the extremely critical discourse on war and
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