Foreword

Flow is a trope commonly used to characterize the free movement of capital and personnel across the surface of the globe as well as the simultaneity of the worldwide spread of products and information. With the global hookup of computers via the Internet and the advent of transnational corporations, what once took months and even years to accomplish can now be merely a click away or an instantaneous act. First showing its signs in nineteenth-century Europe,1 time-space compression becomes all the more pronounced in the age of globalization. “If spatial and temporal experiences are primary vehicles for the coding and reproduction of social relations (as Bourdieu suggests), then a change in the way the former get represented will almost certainly generate some kind of shift in the latter” (Harvey 247). With the duration of time reduced to an instant and movement in space maximized to the greatest extent, there occurs a radical change in a glittering array of things.