Law of Proximity: A Little Closer to Your Non-Neighbor

I am a very science-minded person (since I am also a biology major), so this book, Open Sky, has been very interesting for me to read. In order to explain very philosophical concepts, Virilio uses concrete, tangible examples from science. This I am able to wrap my head around, more so than just trying to grasp abstract ideas. So as I was working through Part II of this book, I was able to start pulling examples from my own experiences to back up what Virilio was claiming.

Miniaturization
The first idea that Virilio introduced was this idea of miniaturization, that everything is consistently being reduced in size. Ultimately, he claims, we will be able to embed technology inside of our body that is small enough to navigate our smallest vessels. I, too, believe that this is true because medical technology is constantly advancing and is one of the problems that doctors have. They learn one new, innovative technique and then another better advance is made. 

Virilio says that miniaturization defines what he calls the Law of Proximity: less is more. This was the overarching theme of Part II. Technology innovation is constantly trying to reduce its material space. The example in Open Sky was moving from a messenger to a letter to an electronic impulse message. I also thought of cell phones that moved from thick telephone size to flip phones to thin, touch screens that fit easily into one's pocket. 

As the Law of Proximity is applied globally, Virilio points out that technology is insistent in reducing the geophysical space between people- think of Skype- and the time differences- think of live streaming capabilities. The boundaries of "here and there," "inside and outside," "high and low" are all being broken and downsized. What does this greater access to the world mean for society? Virilio claims that it has very negative consequences due to the "adoption of a sedentary life [which] become(s) final, absolute, since the functions traditionally distributed within the real space of the town are now exclusively taken over by the real time of the wiring of the human body." 

I beg to differ with this negativity, and maybe that is because I am simply an optimistic person. However, I still enjoy writing and receiving letters even when I have the disposal of the Internet at my hands. It holds a personal element that cannot be found simply through electronic text. Handwriting is an individual's unique mark, an identifying characteristic. I believe that the technological innovation of "the last 'territory'" is a positive thing. We can better understand ourselves, better take care of ourselves, but that by no means indicates that there is a tragedy occurring. We are just able to be closer to our "non-neighbors." 

Grey Ecology
In this chapter, Virilio introduces a need for scientists to explore more than direct ecological ties with the physical environment and to look at technological impacts on the people. This "grey" ecology would study that of the urban ecology. I definitely agree with him that this is a need of our scientific community. While we have looked at the effects of pollution (a consequence of technological innovation) and the "urban heat bubble," we have failed to explore exactly how breaking down temporal and spatial barriers is truly affecting a city's citizens. Science has focused on the objective and has lost a whole field of study in the subjective. Granted, there are the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology that help to quantify the qualitative, but they rarely look at the environment. Typically these areas focus on people. What kind of scientist would this new "grey ecologist" have to be? 

Virilio defines this overlooked area of study as one of relativity. 

"...[W]e cannot long completely go on ingrnoing the damage done by progress in an area ecologists have completely overlooked: the area of relativity, that is of a new relationship to the places and time distances created by the broadcasting revolution, with the recent implementation of the absolute speed of electromagnetic radiation."

This was definitely food for thought.  

World-City

Source

The world-city is an idea of all the cities worldwide reaching a point of such interconnectedness that they can be viewed as one city, ignoring the geo-physical space between them. This, says Virilio, is the metropolization that we should be concerned with rather than population numbers. Such concentration of an infosphere sets us up for an accident.


Until class the other day I did not truly understand what Virilio meant by implying an impending accident. But it was then described as the idea that we couldn't have had plane crashes without the invention of the plane. In the same way, we couldn't have information crashes without the creation of this infosphere. We most definitely have already had unintended accidents from this growing digital sphere: identification theft, cyberbullying, stalking, etc. But Virilio seems to think that the biggest one has yet to happen. I do agree with this pessimistic thought. As humans messing with finicky techonology, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Therefore, we do have a global information crash as a very real possibility in the future. This thought reminded me of the movie Live Free Or Die Hard, one of my all-time favorites. It talks of a fire sail: an attack in which communication, utilities, and power are all shut down. They are shut down through technology. While this portrays only an American accident, I believe that it could be applied worldwide.