And many people are becoming alike. With constant news broadcasts regional accents and expressions disappear, even clothing styles are very homogeneous. It is surreal to see the standard uniform of jeans and t-shirts even in rural Africa or Asia.

Whether these are superficial changes, is hard to say. But even if human nature remains basically the same, a person who wants to think about the world still benefits from having rich symbols and a complex language at his or her fingertips. And symbols do not become rich until they have sat awhile in our lives and gathered some dust.

In our era the tools for thought have also consolidated: there are fewer symbols, fewer words. They are large and imprecise words, too generic to have any real resonance, too opportunistic. Blue jeans mean whatever you want them to mean -- if you try to use them to say something, you have almost no leverage, like trying to pin down a salesman. You cannot be Proust with his madeleine today, no one eats the same foods from year to year as we keep hearing they are bad for us. Things from the past disappear, things from the present are too generic to absorb our particular patterns. There is nothing left to be a container of memories.

Anna, interesting point. However I am not sure diversity is disappearing, it is just becoming distributed differently. In most major cities the experience of the rich and the homeless, the middle-class, the workers and students and immigrants and tourists co-exist, and are worlds unto themselves. Maybe it used to be the case more that things were spread out more "horizontally," some places more aristocratic, some more developed, some very backward, others very poor and rural. Now there is just a kind of layering of everything on top of everything else, which means you can move around the world without leaving your little bubble, but does not mean the other layers do not exist.

Cities are manifestations of the socio-economic system of their region and the culture therein. These systems were once reflections of the environmental conditions of the area in that the social systems created there were an organic response of the population to their environment. Now, as globalization and neoliberalism expand and a socio-economic hierarchy forms with the US on top, local cultures are morphing into mirrors of the US. Also, as US corporations seek markets abroad to expand their consumer-base and influence, US products flow into these countries and further this process. Because this new expanding system is a specifically transatlantic (Western Europe/USA) one, many cultures go through rocky transitions. When the institution of tourism enters new areas too, the natural culture becomes perverted and capitalized, adding to the loss of local beauty and authenitcity, as culture becomes commodified.