ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that Generation Z's interactions with "the real" have become increasingly mediated by technology and refers to everything in the world that is experienced directly by the individual. It contends that through the mediation of the lived experience, or what Paul Virilio calls "cybernetics", the phenomenology of perception has fundamentally transformed; young people no longer strictly inhabit the real but co-inhabit the expansive non-places of substitute realities almost entirely represented by pixels on a screen. The chapter discusses four stages of technological speed progression, which authors contend are gradually leading to the disappearance of the human subject from the real, displacing the body as the center of lived experience in the world. The four stages of technological speed progression are: the development of speed, the motionless motor, technology to see with, and technology to see you with—;; inner non-place.
