Virilio and Gleick use speed as an analytic tool/concept to understand post-contemporary society. Both authors trace the evolution of speed through technology. However, Virilio sees the evolution of speed through war and Gleick analyses speed through the evolution of "time". Virilio?s technological military determinism in ?Speed and Politics? illustrates how we lost slowness through technology and further more how it was developed for the purposes, and from the logic, of war. In ?Faster?, James Gleick provides context for the complexity of post-industrial life and its transformation by technology. He tries to define our relationship with ?time? to understand post-contemporary society. He places our culture's infatuation with speed into a context; historically, technically, and psychologically. Gleick dissects time, showing us how the ability to measure time in ever more exact ways has affected us and the world in which we live in. He claims: ?if we don?t understand time, we become its victims?. Gleick and Virilio?s technological determinism illustrates that technology, not humanity, is responsible for determining the direction and development of human life. Virilio argues that the city, politics, culture, human presence and values are decaying due to the speed/acceleration of life. ?We are passengers of the empty circle who only wish to arrive before they leave. Speed is a perfect will to impotence?. Virilio uses speed as an analytic tool to theorize a post-contemporary society. He develops his post-structuralist critique through the lens of his new methodology, ?dromology?; the science, and study of speed. "Dromomatics" alters our perceptions of speed, examines the role of speed in history and its important functions in urban and social life, warfare, the economy, transportation and communication. ?In this precarious fiction speed would suddenly become a destiny, a force of progress, in other words a "civilization" in which each ...
