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globalisation gets attributed exceptional powers to determine a massive
range of various outcomes as well as strategies of resistance. Yet,
globalisation is also recognized in less homogenous and deterministic
ways as “disordered, full of paradox and the unexpected” (Urry 2003, p.
x).
Although it is common to conceive of globalisation as intimately
related to processes of international economic integration and deregulation
of various barriers to free trade, there is more to it than
economics and politics. As witnessed by tourism, without developments of
transportation networks and information and communication technologies
globalisation would certainly not have been what it is today. One of the
most crucial and significant factors and common characteristic of the
multiple aspects of globalisation is therefore that various technologies,
increasingly computer mediated, have enabled humans and whatever
materials to overcome the “friction of distance”, meaning that longer
distances can be covered and more places reached in a shorter period of
time. Although planet Earth is still of the same old size, this annihilation of
space by time-reducing technologies has in effect shrunken the world as
image 4.2 depicts.
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