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er in detail (for example, Calabrese,
1999; Webster, 2002; Garnham, 2004; Hassan, 2004). What I would,
however, like to focus upon are three issues raised in Castells' work: the
notion of a 'space of flows' that is superseding place; the 'culture of real virtuality'
driven by new media technologies; and the concept of a bifurcation
between globally mobile 'information workers' and those consigned to particular
localized spaces and hence to economic vulnerability in the face of globalization.
Table 2.1 Two tendencies of globalization of products and services
Factor Cost-driven globalization Quality-driven globalization
Nature of product Generic and substitutable; De-standardization and variety as
highly price-sensitive demand drivers of non-price-driven demand
Labour inputs Generic; unskilled and semi-skilled Skilled and specialist; unique bundle
labour of skills often sought
Significance of Low; few location-specific High; tendency for specialist
territory resource or knowledge knowledge to cluster in particular
requirements regions
Consumer More sensitivity to price than other Rising consumer expectations about
demand factors product/se~iceq uality; rising
average consumer incomes
Castells' theory of the global network society develops a geographical
framework based upon the notion of a space of florus, or an organization of
global space where 'the network of communication is the fundamental spatial
configuration: places do not disappear, but their logic and meaning becomes
absorbed in the network' (Castells, 1996, p. 412). It is an example of what
Amin (2001, 2001, p. 395) identifies as an understanding of globalization in
terms of 'a shift in the balance of power between different spatial scales ...
[and] a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of social organization' in
the associated scalar shift of places from the local and the national to the
networked and the global. Amin's critique of such arguments is not based
upon a defence of the local, or a politics of place - which he sees as the flipside
of an interscalar mode of thinking about globalization - but rather
proposes that places such as cities and regions are in fact 'energized networked
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64 Understanding Global Media
spaces' characterized by 'multiple spatialities of organization and praxis'
(Aniin, 2001, p. 396). What Amin is proposing, in contrast to Castells, is that
rather than seeing people as either acting within the particularisms of place or
within the global space of flows, the 'energized networked spaces' that are
critical to the cultural and economic geography of globalization are sites in
which people engage with the local, the national, and the global simultaneously,
and that what is instead challenged are the 'traditional spatial distinctions
between the local as near, everyday, and "ours", and the global as
distant, institutionalised, or "theirs"' (Amin, 2001, p. 395). In other words,
Amin's critique of traditional concepts of spatial ontology (that is, reading the
local, the national and the global as discrete spatial forms) extends Castells'
notion of the network society beyond the geographical framework within
which he has set it.
Castells' understanding of the cultural forms of the global network society
as involving the czrltz~reo f real virtzrality