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If you’ve ever lost track of what day it is after a series of
continent-hopping plane flights, or indeed all sense of self—except for
your trusty mouse hand—when surfing the Net, you may well agree with the
sentiments of Paul Virilio in Open Sky. Virilio rages against the destruction of
“real” spaces and distances in our world by the technological developments of
high-speed travel and telecommunications. But unless you can stomach supposedly
meaningful phrases such as “one day the day will come when the day will not
come”, you had better put the book down and log back on as just another terminal
in cyberspace. Maybe something was lost in translation, but this is so intense
that you have to tackle one sentence at a time to try to grasp what Virilio is
getting at. Highlighting concepts such as “the death of geography” in italics
doesn’t help matters either. Published by Verso, £10, ISBN 1859841813.