The World Is Flat

The World Is Flat

The first time I heard these words was while watching a video where Thomas Friedman, a columnist of the New York Times, was talking about his book "The World is Flat" to a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students. In this book, Friedman said that with the increasing development of technology and individuals quickly adapting to its fast pace changes, we created a flat market platform and "flattened" the world.

There are 3 eras of Globalization. During globalization 1.0 dated from 1492-1820, the world changed from large to medium size. This era was built by countries colonizing other countries. Nations reached out and conquered other nations. This era dates back to prehistory and climaxed in the late 20th century with all the major powers settling in to their current geopolitical arenas.

During globalization 2.0 dated from early 1800's to 2000, he described how the world went from a size medium to small as the focus of global power and markets were transferred from countries to companies in their efforts to attack global markets. This event is more recent and has largely been driven as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which broke down long divisions between east and west and opened up potential markets in Russia and China. This era and the network of fiber optics and open source software applications were developed to make use of them and set the stage for things to come, which we could not have done 10 years ago.

We have entered the current era, which is Globalization 3.0, without even noticing it or being aware. As technology kept developing and improving, the world became smaller and smaller. During globalization 3.0, our planet went from a size small to tiny. This means that individuals and small groups started seeing the need to locate themselves globally.

We flattened the world by developing many different types of technologies and applications, like the internet. Friedman said, "We accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore, and Bethesda our next-door neighbors." Friedman thought that around the year 2000, these technologies and software applications united together and created a world in which we were no longer separated by distance, time, geography, and even language. We created what he called a flat world. This conversion allowed third world countries like China and India to become more competitive in the global market, and even take away market shares from the U.S. by providing cheaper labor and products.

While we were distracted by 9-11, the dot-com bust, and the Enron scandal, we entered the current era of Globalization 3.0. In an effort to open up foreign markets to ourselves, we have unconsciously opened up our market to the world in one of the greatest trade imbalances in the history of human trade. Friedman also argued that there was an imminent need for the U.S.