Globalization (Key Ideas)

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Summary: Unseen Links Bind Distant People, Locations
Review: The world we live on is one planet. It's a simple, obvious observation, but Waters seems to spend much time illustrating this idea. But his view of globalization is not quiet so simple. That we share the same space is a geometrical given. He illustrates even in his preface that people throughout the world have become interrelated. "Tasmanians know that they live on one planet because other people's aerosol sprays have caused a carcinogenic hole in the ozone's layer over their heads, because their relatively high rate of unemployment is due to a slump in the international commodities markets, because their children are exposed to such edifying role models as Robocop." He seems to illustrate that for better or worse; humans throughout the planet are now inextricably linked to one other on economic, political and culture levels. These links are span the global based on their mobility. Waters defines their mobility according to their nature: "material relationships localize, power relationships internationalize and symbolic relationships globalize." Economy for him has a high level of symbolic mediation because it is intrinsically entwined with 'symbolic tokens' that would originally have been money, under Giddens' description, but today extend to even less finite concepts. While cash in the form of coins or bills previously had a physical form, today, the concept of money or capital is, in many cases, just numbers on a transaction sheet. Waters views the economic realm as highly symbolic, highly fluid and highly globalized giving it the capable of moving most rapidly over the planet and subsequently the providing strong impetus for global interactions and subsequently globalization.