Will the internet bring about new patterns of human interaction?

Will we be able to cope with the

environmental stresses that in creasing industrialization and rapid population growth will bring to many
parts of the world? Will the united stases retain ist position as the worlds most powerful and influential
nation? Will more countries move up from peripheral status to join the semiperiphery and core of the
future world system? What kind of problems will the future bring for local. Regional, and international
development? What new technologies are likely to have the most impart in reshaping human
geographies? Will globalization undermine regional cultures? Will technology and human determination
be able to cope with the environmental stresses that industrialization in the periphery and rapid
population increases will inevitably create? Will new regions emerge based on new types of connectivity
such as trade, the internet, or any number of political movements such as mobilizations against
globalization or te human rights movement? These are just a few of the many questions that spring
from the key themes in human geography that we have examined in chapters 5 throush 11. This chapter
examines some scenarios for future geographies, drawing on the principles and concepts established in
chapters 1 through 4

Mapping our futures

The most effective way to approach the questions listed above is to try to get a sence of how different
aspects of globalization are changing the world and how they might continue to do so. As we discussed
in chapter 2, the globalization of the capitalist world-system involves processes that have been occurring
for at least 500 years, but since world war 2, world integration and dramatic. Among the forces driving
integration and transformation are strength ening of regional alliances such as the European union and
the organization of petroleum exporting countries, the increasing connectivity of the most remote
regions of the world due to telecommunications and transportation link ages, and the rise of global
institutions like the world trade organization

How will the force of broadering global connectivity and the popular reaction to then-change the fates
and fortunes of world region whose current coherence owes more to eighteenth-century European
colonialism than to forces of intergration or disintegration incise the twenty-fist century ? to answer this
and related questions, we need to understand what the experts think about the processes behind
globalization and how they might affet ist future potential, but we also need to fist understand the very
risky issue of predictimg the future, how predictions are mode. And how useful predictive exercises can
be.

There is no shortage of visionary scenarios, broadly speaking, futurists projections can be devided into
two kinds, optimistic and pessimistic, optimistic futurists stress the potential for technological
innovations to discover and harness new resources, to provide faster and more effective means of
transportation and communication, and to make possible new ways of living, this sort of futurism is
often characterized by science- fiction cities of cyberspace, it projects a world that will be stabilized and
homogenized by supranational or even ‘’world’’ governments, the sort of geography implied by such
scenarios is rarely spelled out, space, we are led to believe, will be transcended by technological fixes,
To pessimistic futurists, however, this is just ‘’ globaloney’’ they stress the finite nature of earth
resources, the fragility of its environment, and population growth rates that exceed the capacity of
peripheral regions to sustain them, such doomsday, forecasting is characterized by scenarios that
include irretrievable environmental degradation, increasing social and economic polarization, and the
breakdown of law and order, the sort of geography associated with these scenarios is rarely explicit, but
it usually involves the probability of a sharp polarization between the haves and haves- nots at every
geographical scale.

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between the two extreme scenarios of optimism and pessimism,
using what we have learned from the study of human geography, we can suggert a more grounded
outline of future geographies to do so, we must first glance back at the past. Then, looking at present
trends and using what we know about processes of geographic change and principles of spatial
organization, we can begin to map out the kinds of geographies that the future most probably holds,

Looking back at the way that the geography of the world-system has unfolded, we can see now that a
fairly coherent period of economic and geopolitical development occurred between the outbreak of
world war I ( in 1914) and the collapse of the soviet union ( in 1989) some historians refer to this period
as the ‘’ short twentieth century, it was a period when as the ‘’ short twentieth century. It was a period
when the modern wold- system developed its triadic core of the united states, westerm Europe, and
japan, when geopolitics was based on an east-west divide, and when geoecomics was based on an
north-south divide , this was a time when the gepgraphies of specific places and regions withi these
larger frameworks were shaped by the needs on the internal combustion engine, oil and plastiecs,
electrical engineering, aerospace industries, and electronics, in this short century the modern world was
established metropolises of the periphery; from the voting blocs of the west to the newly independent
nation- states of the south

Looking around now, much of the cetablished familiarity of the modern world and its geographies seems
to be disappearing, we have entered a period of transition, triggered by the end of the cold war in 1989
and redenred more complex by the geopolitical and cultural repercusions of the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, and the global financial ‘’ meltdown’’ of 2008, the result I a series of unexpected
deverlopments and unsettling juxta positions, the united states fo example, has given economic aid
Russia; eastern European countries have joined nato and the European union within western countries,
the cultural shifts and neoliberal political climate that have emerged over the same transitional period
have given cause for concern about the fundamental pillars of civil society