'Honey,' I Confided, I Think The World Is Flat By Thomas Friedman

“Honey,” I confided, “I think the world is flat”(Friedman, 5). Prior thoughts to this statement was, “Had not Christopher Columbus already proven to us that the speculation of a flat world was incorrect?” Of course Friedman was only using a metaphor, but I was curious on how he was going to play that off and describe the flatness of the world that we are living in today. It does not take a genius to realize the worldwide competition that is currently going on between countries for knowledge. The competition playing field has actually become much larger due to the “flatness” that the world is experiencing. In Friedman’s book, we explore different “flatteners” that expanded this playing field, what America will need in this new flat world,

Friedman explains it as being a leveled playing field, or in simpler terms, where much larger groups of people can compete for global knowledge. “The flattening of the world means…we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network”(Friedman, 8). Of the first “flatteners” that Friedman explains, is the fall of the berlin wall on November 9, 1989. Friedman believes that the fall of the Berlin Wall “flattened alternatives to free-market-capitalism”(Friedman, 54). I believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall was indeed a step in the flattening of the world. Once the Berlin Wall came down, it allowed everyone to start to think about the world as a whole instead of in pieces. The world could finally be viewed as a single marked. The fall of the berlin wall created an “outbreak of freedom”(Friedman, 54). It allowed knowledge from one border to pour over where it was never allowed to before. It helped create a standard for economies and banking and much

Friedman argues that the Internet and the World Wide Web combined, connected people globally. Friedman is correct about this theory of a flattener because the two phases of the Internet and World Wide Web connect people on a global standard as he stated. The first stage was “ the Apple-PC-Windows phase” (Friedman, 77). This stage enabled people to interact through a contained network. For example, teachers within the same school would interact through a network. The second phase was the “Netscape browsing-e-mail phase” (Friedman, 77). This phase allowed anyone who had the technology to, to interact with everyone else who had the same technology. This plays a huge part in “flattening” the world because this expanded the communication of people around the world immensely. I have relevance to both of these phases because I take part in connecting with people through a network that allows me to contact my coworkers and I also am able to use my email to contact anyone in the world who also has