Required #3(Late) - Friedman Retrospect

Since I am writing this blog much after the fact, I thought it best to look at Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat retrospectively. Throughout the semester, I think I made my feelings regarding Thomas Friedman and The World Is Flat quite apparent. I found his style of writing to be frustrating and repetitive. Perhaps this stems from his background as a newspaper columnist, but it made reading The World is Flat a difficult endeavor. It did not help that the book was clearly out of date as he talked about as the book was clearly written a few years ago. Despite these flaws, looking back Thomas Friedman was not completely wrong. Even though some would say that The World is Flat is nothing more than a love letter to globalization, Friedman was right about some things.

One of the subjects I felt Friedman correctly identified was “The Steroids” as he called them. Friedman described the steroids as things like mobile phones, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and personal digital assistants. When Friedman wrote first wrote this book in 2005, cell phone use was just become widespread amongst the general population. When he released the latest edition in 2007, the IPhone had not even been released to the public yet. At the time, the Motorola RAZR was the most popular cell phone on the market.

Since 2007, "smart phones” have dominated the cell phone markets. These smart phones are just the very “steroids” that Friedman first imagined when he was imaging future flatteners. Today, I can take a picture, send that picture out as a tweet, and then get directions to my house all in one device. In 2007, I would have had to take out my digital camera, use my Garmin to get back home, and then download that picture to my home computer. After I had downloaded that picture, finally I would have uploaded that picture to Twitter. The cell phone has allowed the user to shape, manipulate and transmit information virtually on the go.

In The World is Flat, Friedman definitely over played the role of globalization going into the future however. While the world has become much more globalized, it has not come close to the levels that Friedman predicted. The world economic downturn definitely played a role in the hesitance for countries and companies to continue embracing globalization as they once had. Since the economies became so interconnected, the downturn spread to other economies around the world. Because of the global economic downturn, some countries have even considered the option of withdrawing from economic and political unions. The economic downturn was not the only reason why for globalized failed to reach the levels Friedman predicted.  After a certain point, the law of diminishing returns begins to apply to the application of globalization.

Overall, Friedman was definitely an interesting read and set the mood throughout our various course discussions. Perhaps If I had read The World is Flat when it was originally written, I would not have had such a problem with many of his arguments. However, reading them now many of the arguments just seem wrong.