Multidirectional Flow of People

The purpose of this essay is to evaluate globalisation and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information. Firstly I will focus on globalisation and how migration, culture, economics and politics fit into the picture. Secondly I will focus on how globalisation has affected Ireland. To gain a better understanding of globalisation I must first define it. “Globalisation is a transplanetary process or set of processes involving increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows.” (Ritzer,2010,2) A term that is closely related to globalisation is transnationalism, “processes that interconnect individuals and social groups across specific geo-political borders”. (Ritzer,2010,2) Transnationalism however is limited to interconnections that cross geo-political borders for example, Mexican immigrants living in the US sending remittances home to family members in Mexico. Globalisation includes such connections but is not restricted to them and encompasses a far wider range of transplanetary processes.

Globalisation can be analyzed through conceptual metaphors such as solid, liquid, gases and flows. Before the “global age” people, things, places and information tended to harden over time, this lead to a common attribute which was solidity. Solidity prevented the free movement of people, objects and information as they were limited to one place. However over the last few decades there seems to have been a melt and now globalisation is becoming increasingly mobile or liquid. As the process of increased mobility continues, liquid now turns to gases. This enables globalisation to flow even faster and with greater ease. The new liquid and gases have both constructive and destructive effects. Many global flows are interconnected while others maybe multidirectional flows. However flows do not