Reprinted from the original French (translated by Bernard G. Prusak) from Paul Virilio Le krach visual, La television fragmentee, Mille chaines en bodquets, Actes du colloque des Xermes rencontres du 4 au 7 Decembre 1997.

In his essay The Visual Crash, Paul Virilio discusses the proliferation of web cameras (contingent of course on the growth of the Internet and the development of surveillance technologies to the point of being consumer products) and the implications of this not only for conventional television, commerce, information dissemination and related systems of power, but as well in terms of the globalization of collective imagination and the implicit agreement that societies in which popular surveillance is practiced enter into: that they themselves are monitored in such a way.