ABSTRACT
In contemporary society, there are clear links between world-wide networks and local environments, links that communicate information between different geographical levels. A glance at different forms of culture and sport, for example, indicate how both world-wide relations and local isolation characterise our modern view of life. The British geographer Doreen Massey used the expression a global sense of place to capture this notion in an article on the inhabitants of the shanty towns in Rio de Janeiro:
Who knows global football like the back of their hand, and have produced some of its players; who have contributed massively to global music, who gave us the samba and produced the lambada that everyone was dancing to last year in the clubs of Paris and London; and who have never, or hardly ever, been to downtown Rio. At one level they have been tremendous contributors to what we call time-space compression; and at another level, they are imprisoned in it.
