1. Compare the extent of your activity space to a person your age and gender in a small village in Papua New Guinea. What do you think the differences would be with regard to stage in life, mobility and opportunities?
2. How has use of the Internet broken down each of the barriers (distance, cost, physical environment, cultural, psychological) that slow or prevent spatial interaction?
3. If you had a business, how might you use the principles of contagious diffusion and hierarchical diffusion to to sell your product?
4. Think about a move that you or someone in your family made either from a foreign country or within the country you now live. What were the push and pull factors that influenced the move? What are the push/pull factors that would influence you to move from your current location?
5. Globalization is an important issue right now. It has cultural, economic and political aspects. Give several examples of each. Can you think of several dramatic examples of backlash against dominant Western culture? If some people are hostile, why do American cultural artifacts, from fast food to contemporary music, remain so popular?
6. Migration has allowed economically precocious minorities to build businesses in less developed regions, enriching themselves and their host countries. This has also occasionally provoked hostile reactions from local populations that has included expropriation and murder. This has also resulted in discriminatory legislation against Chinese businesses in Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as the expulsion of Indian minorities in a number of East African nations. Can such actions ever be justified?
