Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with innovating social gaming and advertising. In fact, the
popular Facebook game FarmVille launched a year after
HappyFarmer launched on Renren. Advertisers, including
Lay's, pay to place their products in Renren's games. In
HappyFarmer, a player can plant Lay's potatoes and take
them to a Lay's potato chip factory.
China allows Renren and its competitor, Kaixin001,
to operate because they have agreed to the political cen-
sorship mandated by the Chinese government. For exam-
ple, according to
Fast Company
, Renren censors “a range
of sensitive keywords, including terms related to the Dalai
Lama, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and Chinese
dissidents including 2010 Nobel Peace laureate Liu
Xiaobo.” Renren users report that they receive a warning
message when they update their status or post a comment
that is censored by Renren.
Controlling information fl ow is increasingly diffi cult
in China, and many argue that despite being censored,
Renren and its competitors allow for freer fl ow of ideas
than previously possible in communist China.
Transportation and communication technologies
have altered
distance decay
. No longer does a map with a
bull's-eye surrounding the hearth of an innovation
describe how quickly the innovation will diffuse to areas
around it (Fig. 4.15 top). Rather, what geographer David
Harvey called
time-space compression
explains how
quickly innovations diffuse and refers to how interlinked
two places are through transportation and communica-
tion technologies (Fig. 4.15 bottom).
In the past few decades, major world cities have
become much closer to each other as a result of modern
technologies, including airplanes, high-speed trains, express-
ways, wireless connections, fax machines, e-mail, and tele-
phone. Places that lack transportation and communications
technologies are now more removed from interconnected
places than ever. All of the new technologies create the
infrastructure through which innovations diffuse. Because
the technologies link some places more closely than others,
ideas diffuse through interconnected places rapidly rather
than diffusing at constant rates across similar distances.
HEARTH
A. DISTANCE DECAY
HEARTH
Hearths of Popular Culture
Popular culture diffuses hierarchically in the context of
time-space compression, with diffusion happening most
rapidly across the most compressed spaces. As we saw in the
last section, even local customs practiced for centuries in
one place can be swept up into popular culture. How does a
custom, idea, song, or object become part of popular cul-
ture? It is relatively easy to follow the communications,
transportation, and marketing networks that account for
the diffusion of popular culture, but how do we fi nd the
hearths of popular culture, and how do certain places estab-
lish themselves as the hearths of popular culture?
B. TIME-SPACE COMPRESSION
Figure 4.15a, b
Distance Decay and Time-Space Compression.
With
distance decay, the likelihood of diffusion decreases as time and
distance from the hearth increases. With time-space compres-
sion, the likelihood of diffusion depends on the connectedness
(in communications and transportation technologies) among
places.
© E. H. Fouberg, A. B. Murphy, H. J. de Blij, and John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
