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!

Week5- Neil Postman

In the article “Ecologizing Mobile Media”, Howard Rheingold applied Postman's "Ten Principles of Technology” to imention the present of cell phones. Although I think that technologies will allow people have more convenient life and bring a lot of benefits, I still agree Postman's "Ten Principles of Technology”- new technology sometimes destroys more than it creates.


Here are some websits about Neil Postman:
http://www.bigbrother.net/~mugwump/Postman/ http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Postman.html


In my opinions, the history of human society has proved that technology itself is neither good nor bad; depends on the way in which people use it that determines its influence on the whole society. Just as the coin has its two sides, technology is a two-edged sword.

Granting that technology has undoubtedly provide us lots of problem, but no one can deny that it provide us more comfortableness and convenience than its demerits by enhancing the development and application of technology and offering the human a better living environment. By the invention of electric bulb, we no longer live in the darkness. Through the telecommunication system, we may gain the information and reply as quickly as possible without consuming us too much time. Due to the help of computer, we may have more free time to do whatever we like. And with the recycling system, we may to some extent solve the shortage of water in cities. In general, whether it is bad or good in itself, it benefits us in almost every aspect of our life and completely changed the whole world. More importantly, it is indispensable for the human to continuously improve the living standard and the environment.

Also, technology has helped to solve the problem it brings us when it’s used improperly. Take the nuclear weapon threat as an example. No one would definitely argue that Germany would not be able to invent the atomic bomb to reach, but in fact it would destroy the world. Another example can be provided that the automobile gives out the gas which pollutes the air and threatens our health. Therefore, technology also causes many disadvantages in our life.

To sum up, it is not a wise view to regard technology as the source of evil or goodness. It's just a two-edged sword; to use it properly for the whole human’s benefits will bring positive changes upon human and the society, but if used by some authoritarians for their selfish purposes, it will create more new problems and even damage the whole society.