The World Is Flat

Thomas L. Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and author of several books on globalization, reveals his thoughts on the state of the economy and the role of the web on globalization. During a trip to Bangalore, India, where he studied the effects of outsourcing on the local economy, he realized that globalization has changed core economic concepts and he begins to write The World is Flat ...

“The World Is Flat” analyzes globalization, primarily in the early 21st century.

The title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce, where all competitors have an equal opportunity. It refers to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

From globalization 1.0 to globalization 3.0 ...

According to Friedman, in the twenty-first century appeared the flattening of the economic playing field on the same platform (the Web) enabling many forms of collaboration. That process is done in 3 major eras:

In the first, he calls "Globalization 1.0" and which begins in 1492 until the early nineteenth century, globalization is driven by the country. States are active players in the world (Spain and Portugal explore Latin America and the East Asia, Britain colonized India).

"Globalization 2.0" begins in the nineteenth century and ended in 2000. The action is conducted by companies that globalize themselves to reach new markets and lower labor costs.

In "Globalization 3.0", from 2000 to today, what is new and different is that this momentum is carried by individuals.

From digitalization of content to social web ...

What are the steps that, in the end, make individuals the dynamics of globalization?

Friedman talks about three key stages. 

The first appears with the PC, which enabled the digitization of content (text, images, audio, video), making them malleable by other users and easy to share.

The second step appeared on August 9, 1994 with the IPO of Netscape , the startup that launched the first web browser. This is actually the browser that breathed life to the Internet. It is also the date that begins the "dotcom boom", system in which startups are over-funded. Then occur the "dotcom bubble".

The third step is the revolution in communication protocols, or he calls the alphabet soup (php, xml, html, http, css ...), allowing interconnectivity. The idea is that, whatever the machine on which you work, computer languages enable you to collaborate with anyone in the world.

These three steps lead to the creation of a global platform enabling individuals to participate / connect / work fairly and comprehensively, and the ability to send its contents everywhere for free.

What is learned from the "Globalization 3.0" is that we no longer download, but we upload. We put online our digital content using the levers of social web .

Examples: open source software, Wikipedia, YouTube and the millions of blogs or other social networks.

In a global world 3.0, the most important economic competition is the one between individuals and their own imagination. When the world is flat and that people have so much power, imagination is the true engine of the economy.