Arjun Appadurai

The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot be captured by theories that stress homogenization or simple polarization.

Globalization is not a single process, but a set of disjunctive and overlapping processes, which are not always in sync with each other.

The central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.

Imagination is now a social fact, and not merely a private escape.

The imagination is no longer a matter of individual fantasy, but a structured field of social practice.

Ethnoscapes are the landscapes of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and persons.

Mediascapes refer to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world.

Technoscapes are the global configuration of technology, moving at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries.

Financescapes are the mysterious, rapid, and deep movements of capital, currencies, and futures.

Ideoscapes are concatenations of images, largely political, often directly ideological, and frequently involving the ideologies of states and counter-ideologies of movements explicitly bent on capturing state power or a piece of it.

The nation-state is increasingly a 'deterritorialized' phenomenon, in which the links between people, territory, and sovereignty are becoming more tenuous.

The production of locality is an inherently fragile and provisional achievement.

The global is not everywhere, but it is everywhere in its effects.

The global is not a single thing, but a set of relationships.

The global is not simply the sum of its parts, but a new emergent property.

The global is not a place, but a condition.

The global is not a destination, but a journey.

The global is not a choice, but a fact.

The global is not a solution, but a problem.

The global is not a threat, but an opportunity.