David Harvey described the experience of postmodernity as follows: 

The whole world's cuisine is now assembled in one place in almost exactly the same way that the world’s geographical complexity is nightly reduced to a series of images on a static television screen … The general implication is that through the experience of everything from food, to culinary habits, music, television, entertainment, and cinema, it is now possible to experience the world's geography vicariously, as a simulacrum. The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production.

             (1989: 300)

Harvey is following here Marx’s account of commodity fetishism according to which commodities acquire a ghost-like autonomy from their material or social relations of production. Globalization juxtaposes elements from distant cultures abstracted from the social contexts in which they have emerged, thus creating a fragmented and discontinuous experience. In this experience of simultaneity of the world’s geography a key social relation that is obscured is translation, which necessarily mediates between different linguistic communities. Globalization theory which focusses primarily on mobility and flows is compelled to repeat this negation because its very focus on the circulation sphere prevents it from being able to deal appropriately with the social processes and relations of production that shape contemporary globalization.

A notable exception to this is Saskia Sassen's analysis of global cities. Sassen explicitly denounces the partiality of theories that emphasize the hypermobility of capital and information, the capacity for instantaneous transmission around the world rather than the infrastructure it presupposes (1998: 202). For her, 'introducing cities into an analysis of economic globalization allows us to reconceptualize processes of economic globalization as concrete economic complexes situated in specific places', thus recovering the 'localized processes through which globalization exists' (1998: xix, xx). Her account of global cities, by focussing on the social and economic processes that occur in the most fluidly connected points or nodes of the space of flows, solidly articulates the relationship between the global and the local in specific places, also breaking with views such as those of Manuel Castells and Zygmunt Bauman (1998) which emphasize the distinctive time–spaces of hypermobile capital and place-bounded labour. Thus, Sassen insists that:

A focus on the work behind command functions, on the actual production process in the finance and services complex, and on global marketplaces has the effect of incorporating the material facilities underlying globalization and the whole infrastructure of jobs typically not marked as belonging to the corporate sector of the economy. An economic configuration emerges that is very different from that suggested by the concept of information economy. We recover the material conditions, production sites, and placeboundedness that are also part of globalization and the information economy. (1998: xxiii–xxiv, original emphasis)