From Military Threats to Everyday Fear

Abstract

The history of combat is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception. In other words, war consists not so much of scoring territorial, economic or other material victories but of appropriating the immateriality of perceptual field. The function of the eye has become the function of the weapons (Virilio, 1989; 2009). To understand information age warfare we have to understand the concept of representation as a part of our process of violence. The idea of information warfare or an information operation is based on the process where the physical target is no longer destroyed with the kinetic systems, but the process where the non-kinetic systems, like information, scan the symbols-semiotics networks. We like to consume safety different kind of fears. The feeling of the safety fear based on the virtual boundaries, which are set in the movement from “principle” to “practice, in other words in the actualization of the cyber-form. The power of fear is not a form. It is not abstract. It is the movement of form into the content outside of which it is a void of potential function, of the abstract into the particular it cannot be or do without. (see Massumi 1993, 20-21) Today, particularly the advanced mobile technology, the Internet and the entertainment industry immensely exploit the experiences from different wars and conflicts for example as ideas of computer games. In return the military industrial complex represents its own language for example in the concept of information operations with the help of applications particularly rising from the entertainment industry. The roles of Hector and Achilles, the teachings of Jomini and Clausewitz have an effect in the background of games and gaming. Opposite to Clauseiwitz’s thinking, Jomini took the view that the amount of force deployed should be kept to the minimum in order to lower casualties and that war was a science, not an art. The most central genres in gaming are ”strategy”, ”adventure”, ”shooter”, ”sports”, ”simulation”, ”music”, ”role playing” and ”puzzle”. All of these are related to warfare one way or another. Another interesting fact is that in the 1950’s the first computer games were mathematic strategy based games that that had been developed in universities (Czosseck, 2009; Peltoniemi, 2009).