Reflection on the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman

There are kind of titles that give me an immediate clue about what a book or an article will be about. “The world is flat” was a metaphoric title that made me reflect on it some minutes and finally I got confused and had no idea how the author would argue this idea.  Watching the presentation of the book done by the author I was assured that this book is not a science-fiction but it is our reality, it speaks about the world which moves much faster than it seems to us, and how it’s important to stay awake.   

The arguments that Friedman gives supporting the flatness of the world are very surprising and at the same time very trivial. First of all Friedman speaks about the globalization in the 21th century. The fact that people become more able to work together and to easily share with each other culture, education and economy is a factor that makes the world flat. Speaking about several flatteners Friedman claims that this is only the beginning of this phenomenon. The first flattener that Friedman analyzes in the book is the Collapse of Berlin War 11.89, which allowed people from one side to collaborate with the other side. The other important flattener is the Netscape. The Internet broadened people to people connectivity giving equal possibilities for every single user “No company can dominate the internet”.  However people to people connectivity is not enough to have a flat world, so it’s time to apply the internet. The internet gives us opportunity to get the application of another computer from any location and from any distance (e-tickets, e-magazines etc.) These three factors created new “platform for collaboration”, which make the world flatter. The other flatteners are new sources of collaboration that exist in 21^st century such as open sources, offshoring, insourcing etc. 

These new sources of collaboration are highly important in education. Open source is a new form of collaboration which gives learners infinite possibilities to get information, to learn independently and to share ideas, an example is Wikipedia which is globally produced open encyclopedia. 

Friedman argues that all these flatteners work together and move very rapidly and we must learn how to learn, we must teach ourselves, we must be innovative and curious in order to manage to keep a real connection with the world and people and not to stay behind.

So, in conclusion it can be noted that Friedman’s book is a kind of prehistory of the digital youth portrait of 21^st century, which is a natural result of a generation that lives in a “flat world”.

Useful links
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/the-world-is-flat