are, to use Crang’s terminology, those which give rise to ‘world as
mosaic’ conceptions of the globe – delineated suburbs, villages, towns,
regions and nation-states, for example. According to Castells this has
been superseded by interrelationships of knowledge, power, information
and other flows through space. Castells distinguishes between the ‘wired
world’ and the ‘social world’ of networks (Taylor et al., 2002, p. 8). The
former refers to the system of telecommunications that makes e-transfers
possible, and the latter to relationships between people that sustain these
transfers. The latter is facilitated by the former and makes the network
society operational. Geographers barely understand these spaces of flows
– not least because they are evolving so rapidly. Central to this debate is
the question of the relative importance of the two types of spaces. Places
still exist, the nodes in the networks are important, and economic and
social agglomerations are still significant responses and transmitters of
flows, be they informational or otherwise. Furthermore, before the
supposed advent of the network society, spaces of flows existed in the
form of international trade, cultural exchange and political interaction,
for example. However, these networks were less pervasive than they
are today. The core geographical implication of this is that the simple
divisions of the world along hierarchies such as core and periphery
have become blurred and are likely to become more so. This produces
glocalized outcomes, as we explore below.