Abstract
‘What is globalization?’ uses the story of how a lost iPhone turned its American owner into an Internet celebrity in China to illustrate our increased interconnectedness in both embodied and disembodied globalization (safer, faster air travel, and improved digital technology). When searching for a definition of globalization, it helps to distinguish between globalization, globality, and the global imaginary, which is people’s growing consciousness of the world as a single whole. Globalization as a process does not automatically lead to globalization as a condition. It is a complex, uneven set of processes taking place across world-time and world-space. Globalization is about intensifying planetary interconnectivity.
