 The time it takes for something to reach another place is getting shorter  Promotes rapid changes  Spreads cultural and economic ideas much more quickly  Ex. Cross-continental travel It’s a Small World…and getting smaller.

 Only possible by physical travel in the past  Today, people can interact in many forms  Facebook  Teleconference  Limits potential for ‘distance decay’  Groups far apart were unlikely to interact in the past. elsie-escobar22.jpg

 Process by which something spreads across space from one place to another over time  Ex. – inventions, ideas, values  Hearth – The place from which an innovation originates Spread of cell phone usage,

 Spread of an idea through the physical movement of people from one place to another  Usually for political or economic reasons  Newcomers bring their culture with them (language, religion…)

 The spread of a feature from one place to another in a ‘snowballing process’  Three kinds of expansion diffusion:  Hierarchical diffusion  Contagious diffusion  Stimulus diffusion content/uploads/snowball_iStock_ XSmall.jpg equation.com/wp- content/uploads/snowball_iStock_ XSmall.jpg

 Hierarchical  Ideas or trends are spread by persons of power or influence  Ex. Trends in fashion often start in NYC, Paris, or Milan and spread to the rest of the world.

 Contagious  Widespread diffusion throughout the population  The farther you are from the source, the later you are impacted  Ex: Spread of communicable diseases  Ex1: Students will talk with slang well before it reaches the teachers.

 Stimulus  Spread of an underlying principle (ex. computer mouse)  Mac and Windows were about the same until Windows used the mouse, then it spread faster.

 Core regions - North America, Western Europe, Japan  Peripheral regions – most of Asia, Africa, Latin America  Uneven Development  Increasing gap in economic conditions between regions of the world (core vs. periphery)  Result of a global economy