Harvey explains how, due to the advancements in technology, transport and communication, the consumer is able to ‘experience the world’s geography vicariously’ via these images (1989).
This, however, has social ramifications as the bringing together of different worlds of commodities ‘does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or the social relations implicated in their production’ (Harvey, 1989). The focus of the consumer is turned away from production and labour to the commodity. This becomes particularly problematic when the demands of mass production (long working hours, excessive output expectations) impinge upon the wellbeing of workers. For example, it means that a consumer in the West could consume a product created in a sweatshop in India without having to consciously consider the human cost of the labour. Time-space compression allows for the customer to consume goods from all across the world almost instantaneously without really querying how this was possible.
Paul Virilio & ‘speed-space’
French cultural theorist, Paul Virilio (1932-2018) furthered discussions of time-space compression with his concept of ‘speed-space’. Virilio, in an interview, describes this ‘new other time’ as being ‘that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming’ (2017, OnScenes). The example Virilio gives is the video recorder – we are able to manipulate time using the machine to watch something which occurred in the past. Virilio argues we live in a high-speed society characterised by rapid movement, speedy communication and accelerated production.
Virilio’s research has focused primarily on our concept of speed and space in relation to warfare and information technology. The progress of technology, Virilio argues, is evident through how warfare is conducted in relation to time, rather than space. In the past, warfare was primarily about conquering space and movement; with the progress of technology, warfare places greater value on optics. Virilio writes in War and Cinema (1989) that, ‘[m]ilitary actions take place “out of view”, with radio-electrical images substituting real time for a now failing optical vision’ (1989).
This transformation of warfare is congruent with this prioritising of the image over the real, of time over space, which Virilio sees as occurring throughout society, particularly in the digital world. In Polar Inertia (1991), he writes that:
