The World is Flat post 2

In the second chapter of The World Is Flat we see Friedman clearly depicting how technology is reshaping human interaction personally, inter-nationally, and economically. He does this by taking us through "ten forces" that he believes to have flattened the world. The first is when the Berlin Wall fell and Windows was first introduced to the U.S., the second is when Netscape went public, the third is work flow software, the fourth is uploading, the fifth is outsourcing and explains Y2K, the sixth is off shoring, the seventh is what Friedman refers to as supply-chaining, the eighth is in sourcing, the ninth is in-forming, and finally the tenth is about what Friedman refers to as "steroids".

We see clearly through several examples that Friedman describes for us that technology is reshaping human interaction personally. How we as Americans react with our peers around us has changed drastically in the last 15 years. Having a conversation with someone face to face or over the telephone is rarely necessary anymore due to the invention of email. At the time of its invention it was called SMTP which translates down to simple mail transfer protocol. With email you can send people mail digitally without worrying about postage stamps or how long it will take to ship to the receiving party. Anyone at any time can give their take on a subject now as well through a simple process called blogging. In a blog they can include anything that they would like and then publish it for the world to see. Another example that Friedman provides us with has to do with children's cartoon shows. In the book he informs us about a children's show called Higgly Town Hero's and that several of the actors that do the voices for the characters reside in different states. They do not even have to be in the same 300 hundred mile radius as each other and they can still put a children's show together using audio recording devices over the Internet. Many people have been sharing more than emails through the Internet in recent years though. Friedman states that "file sharing, the peer-to-peer model, allows computer users to share songs, video, and other kinds of files with one another online. Peer-to-peer networks emerged in the public eye with Napster which enabled any two of us to share songs stored on each other's computers. At it's peak Napster was perhaps the most popular Web site ever created. In less than a year, it went from zero to 60 million visitors per month." Later on down the page Friedman goes on to state that "some 330 million tracks were purchased online in 2004 from online stores such as Apple's iTunes, the Associated Press reported on June 22, 2005, but around 5 billion were downloaded for free by people tapping open file sharing networks using freely downloadable file-sharing programs such as eDonkey, BitTorrent, and Kazaa." In fact it was not long before even phone calls could be placed over the Internet through the book we are told about a company named VoIP that lets you make phone calls through the Internet and provides you with unlimited long-distance and local phone calls and the only catch is that you have to buy a small microphone attachment for your computer. Given all of this information we can clearly see that the way that we interact personally with people is changing rapidly due to new technological developments.

How we interact with people inter-nationally is also changing rapidly. Due to recent advances in technology even business meetings are no longer the same they can be held with people in another country without that party being present. Friedman tells about this new development called video-conferencing. He states that "each party to the video-conference sits at a long table facing a wall of flat-panel TV screens and cameras pointed at them. The flat-panel screens display the people at the other site, which could be anywhere in the world. It creates an effect of everyone sitting around a single conference table and is apparently a qualitatively different experience from anything that has been on the market before." Each video conference suite costs about $250,000 but the company's believe that they can make it up in the long run by not having to pay for airplane tickets to have executives flown in from other country's. Even X-rays are not always being examined by doctors here in the U.S. in recent years. Friedman tells us that an X-ray can be taken in Bangor Maine and sent to Bangalore to be read without either of the party's even giving it a second thought.

Economically technology is completely reshaping the world. Before the modern advances in technology India was always at a three percent growth rate but after 1991 they hit a growth rate of 7 percent. Before 1991 they had roughly $1 billion dollars left in currency but as of 2005 when Friedman was writing this book they had hit over $118 billion dollars in currency and there is no doubt that is has only grown from there. Due to the fall of the Berlin Wall alone the European Union expanded from fifteen to twenty-five countries. Due the invention of Microsoft Friedman tells us that "within five years, the number of Internet users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million. At one point, it was doubling every 53 days." This alone raked in a huge amount of money for the company and their stock. Due to the invention of fiber optic cables more than twice the amount of phone calls can process through the same set of wires and at a much lower cost to all party's involved whether it is the consumer or the producer. When the idea of fiber optic cables was first introduced as opposed to the copper ones already in existence Friedman states that "in a period of about five or six years, these telecom companies invested about $1 trillion in wiring the world." Friedman also tells us that just since the year 2000 "sales of sports video games in the United States increased by 34 percent, to $1.2 billion."

Technology is rapidly changing our world as we know it today. It has come with major economic benefits and has knocked down several obstacles that were once considered major communication blockers. It is no problem to buy merchandise from China these days or set up a factory in India but both of these would have been considered very risky moves a mere 15-20 years ago. Even the way we speak to our neighbors has changed today. Rarely do we see anyone getting up and going over to visit with them but merely sending an email with a full update. There is no longer any real need to buy a birthday card either. You can simply log online and find a free e-card that has the same message, dances, and can be delivered in half of the time. But at a certain point will we as humans just be advancing ourselves right out of jobs?