Module 1: ix-77

Thomas Friedman shares his experiences as he travels around the world about the different ways people communicate through business and commerce. He obverses that where at one time a king would tell each person exactly where they fit into the world, people are thinking for themselves and creating a space to fit into with their own ideas.

The three stages of globalization are about who has the power to choose where they conduct their business. In the early, pre-Columbus years, rulers and the people they ruled relied mostly on themselves for everything they needed. When Columbus was seeking for a new trade route to trade for east Asian goods, he helped make the shift of power to countries and empires to control what other countries they traded with. As technology progressed and companies grew, they began to reach out internationally and claim their own business without their governments or leaders telling them what to do. Eventually, near the end of the twentieth century, the power trickled down to the individual to carry out their own ideas and sell products to customers across the globe as efficiently as a large company could. Friedman describes it as “leveling the playing field” but I picture it more like a network of resources that raise the little guy up to the level of the biggest competitors. Friedman thinks the flattening of the world is driven by business and economic powers deciding with whom and where they do business. The difference between the 3 stages of Globalization is who holds the power to make those decisions. 

Many developments in technology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped create a few economical powerhouses like the U.S. While business was booming in some places, it was suppressed in others. Communist Russia was limiting itself by not letting it’s people connect with others and sharing ideas and knowledge. When the Berlin Wall came down, it was a welcomed symbol of the world opening up between each person. It opened up the idea of sharing more knowledge and came at the perfect timing of when the best information sharing tool was just becoming popular, the internet. People could communicate with anyone else easier than ever,  and feed off of each others ideas. Friedman thinks the breaking down of the Berlin Wall reminded people of what was right in front of them the whole time: a world of collaboration instead of separate countries in competition.

One thing I did not realize before I started reading “The World is Flat” was how different the internet and World Wide Web were. Few had access to the internet and even less knew how to use it, and even then it was not very useful. Then, along came the web with the most important tool: browsers. Netscape made it possible for anyone to connect with anybody else and take advantage of several resources. This created a boom in demand for software and hardware to take advantage of the internet. Netscape was important because it made the leap from being able to digitize and manipulate our own information into being able to share that information with anyone else, anywhere in the world.