Week5-The World is Flat!!!

I have read this book “The World Is Flat” in Taiwan. It’s a bestseller in every bookstore and its contents actually shocked me . After 9/11, Friedman paid less attention to globalization. He spent three years to travel the Arab and Muslim world to try to get at the roots of the attack on the US. Finally, he realized that while he was writing about terrorism, he missed an even bigger story: Globalization. Thersfore, he wrote "The World Is Flat" to explain his updated opinion on this subject.


Nandan Nilekani at Infosys said to Friedman, "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." These words invade his mind. He thinks that Indians and Chinese were going to compete for job market like never before, and Americans weren't ready. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance.

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Flattener #1
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unlashed forced that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire. But it actually did so much more. It tipped the balance of power across the world toward those advocating democratic; besides, it unlock enormous pent-up energies for hundreds of millions of people in places like India, Brazil, China, and the former Soviet Empire. It also allowed us to think about the world differently-to see it as more of a seamless whole. Because the Berlin Wall was not only blocking our way; it was blocking our sight.


Furthermore, it paved the way for the adoption of common standards- standards on how economies should be run, on how accounting should be done, on how banking should be conducted, on how PCs should be made, and on how economics papers should be written. In the early to mid-1980s,the information revolution began. Thanks to the spread of fax machines, telephones and PC, too much information started to slip through the Iron Curtain. In this information age, the emergence of more and more across communication lead people to clloect information and increase personal power.


Flattener #2
Netscapes is the second flatttener. There are three reasons: Netscape brought the Internet alive with the browser. They allowed the Internet to could be used by Grandma and even her grandchildren. The second thing that Netscape did was commercialize a set of open transmission protocols so that no company could own the Net. Moreover, the third is that Netscape triggered the dotcom boom, which triggered the dotcom bubble, which triggered the overinvestment of a trillion dollars in fiber-optic cables.

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The speed of the world’s change is faster and faster, and the globalization is impossible to take a rest because of resistance of someone, enterprising or the country, so you can’t evade from the trend. The only method we have to do is to join the trend, we have to substantiate ourself and do many effort to learn skills and knowledge and don't be evicted from the trend. Just as said in the book: '”The world, just like a football game, if you’re not good enough, you will only sit and watch the game.”


There is saying that I like ver much in the film " Jurassic Park " : Life will find the way out. In this flatten world, knowledge is extremely easy to obtain, but you should to receive voluntarily and assiduously. I believe that chances are always provided for person who have an adequate preparation. If you do not dare to buy the flight ticket, you have no chance to travel around the world!