There can be little doubt that, relative to the past, people and processes
in ‘far-off’ places can have almost instant ‘local’ impacts. Geographers
and other social scientists have used a number of other terms for this
process including ‘annihilation of space by time’, ‘time–space
convergence’ and ‘time–space compression’ (see Figure 1.1) (Harvey,
1989). Economic contagion has become a new buzz-word in financial
sectors, for example. The Asian ‘crisis’ of 1997 quickly spread around
the Pacific Asia region from Thailand, to South Korea, and on to
Japan, and the ramifications of the collapse had a rapid and tangible
impact on economies all across the world to varying degrees. But this
‘shrinking’ appears to be permeating all spheres of human activity.
Twenty-four-hour news providers, such as CNN and the BBC, broadcast
unfolding events, such as the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean
tsunami, in real time to people’s homes and offices across the planet and
this prompts an instant outpouring of relief donations from around the
globe. Carbon dioxide emissions in the USA or China have a direct
impact on small island states as sea level rises and cyclone events
become more common in localities such as Grenada in the Caribbean or
Niue in the Pacific. Feasibly, then, we could talk of increased cultural,
social, environmental and political contagion given the new fluidity of
global flows. What is for sure is that the way that many of us experience
the world is shifting in sometimes dizzying ways and that a revolution
in technologies of interaction has played a central role in this (see
Table 1.1).