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1. 'Human Geographers Argue That The World May Be "Shrinking", But Not At The Same Rate For Everybody Everywhere'. Discuss

Today’s world portrays vast communication and exchange across geographical borders, due to centuries of technological innovations causing places to “move” closer together. People can themselves physically move around the planet far quicker, by means of modern transport innovations. People can also communicate across ever increasing distances, due to modern media and ICT innovations.
Although there has been a long history of human movement and communications spanning the world, it is in the last two hundred years that we have seen a dramatic “speeding up” of this. The geographer Nigel Thrift called this a ‘hyperactive world,’ a world that is ever more inter-connected. As he put it, simple distinctions break down between the ‘here’ and ‘there’, between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. It is this that in many people’s views constitutes globalisation. These main concepts of time-space compression (due to modern innovations), globalisation and how these have spread unevenly and have caused inequalities across the globe, will constitute the main body of this essay.
With the spread of transnational corporations we find that the goods we buy and consume are most likely to be produced in countries thousands of miles away, by workers we will never meet. The books, films, music and art that we admire as cultural beauties will too stem from a wide range of locations. Even the food we eat tends to be a conglomeration of national dishes from across the globe. So, in a sense, everywhere contains bits of everywhere else.
Aside from this, these days our own worlds expand to take in many other places. This is due to the ease and relative in-expense of modern day travel, which allows us physically to travel the length and breadth of the globe, and the spread of technical innovations such as the internet, allowing us to contact anywhere in the world at the push of a button.
All of this however begs the question, who are ‘we’ here, and is this situation the same for...