Globalization is most directly and visibly at work in popular culture. Increased leisure time, instant communications, greater affluence for many people, heightened mobility, and weakened attachment to family and place—all features of popular culture—have the potential, through interaction, to cause massive spatial restructuring. Most social scientists long assumed that the result of such globalizing forces and trends, especially mobility and the electronic media, would be the homogenization of culture, wherein the differences among places are reduced or eliminated. This assumption is called the convergence hypothesis; that is, cultures are converging, or becoming more alike. In the geographical sense, this would yield placelessness, a concept discussed earlier in the chapter.
A hypothesis holding that cultural differences among places are being reduced by improved transportation and communications systems, leading to a homogenization of popular culture.