The Consequences of Modernity

Modernity is inherently globalising. Giddens examines the globalising process through a sociological lens, concentrating on the way social life is ordered across time and space (time-space distanciation). Globalisation has rapidly increased the level of simultaneous local involvements and the interaction across distance, meaning that the local is shaped by other local events and by the global, and the global is shaped by multiple locals, at a much more intense rate than ever previously. This creates a sense of 'one world', which has several effects. The global production process has spread out to include all parts of the world in a global division of labour. This has enabled the diffusion of production and communication technologies worldwide. It has also brought about shifts in the global distribution of production and communication (for example, some of the advanced capitalist market-economies of the West are now deindustrialising). The macro shifts brought about by globalisation reach down to the local level through conditioning our way of perceiving the world and transforming 'knowledge'; modernity in its present form would not be possible without, for example, the pool of knowledge that we know as 'the news'.