Humanism and the Flat World

Almost every era has its own revolution, one that will bring with it a key that unlocks the door to the following era. During the time period of the Renaissance, the revolutionary concept that took place was the acceptance of Humanism. Even today we have revolutionary ideas that are still randomly reflecting off of our globe. One that appears to have made its way through our atmosphere and is here to stay is globalization. Our world appears to be getting flatter by the second, and if we are not careful we may just tumble our way into orbit. Revolutions occur when people begin opening up their minds and toying with the unknown. They almost always help to further the development of the known society.

The flat world is revolutionizing how we view ourselves in society today. No, the world is not really flat this is just in a metaphorical sense. Technology is supposedly making our world a flatter place because today we can contact our pen pal in Japan just as easily as our next door neighbors. In this “flat world” our middle class jobs are being bumped up a level and the competition with our foreign countries is becoming more intense. Due to this competition and these recent technological developments we will have to put twice as much effort in as our parent’s generation did and certainly more then the generation before them. In short, the flattening of the world is revolutionizing what we find socially acceptable.

Humanism revolutionized how people living during the time period of the Renaissance, viewed themselves and the world around them. Humanism began when humanists started popping up amongst the population. Humanists were people that refused to accept the status quo at the time. This brought chaos, division amongst what had been one body of people, and essentially revolution.

During the Renaissance everyone was grouped together as one large body under the Catholic Church. People lived in fear daily of committing a sin such as usury and not being allowed into Heaven. Humanism brought an end to this fear for many people. They started living for today and not what tomorrow might bring. Many people did decide to stay in the church body, but even that began to divide within its self. Humanism is a huge piece of what caused the church to start to split off into different denominations. The entire world changed with this concept. People no longer viewed themselves and each other as simply people on the journey to Heaven, but as individuals living each day to its fullest.

Humanism had an amazingly large impact on society as it was previously known during the Renaissance. In fact, without it we would not have the current society that we have today. The amount of beliefs and many forms of art simply would not exist. Without Humanism, our world would be more circular as opposed to the pancake that it is rapidly becoming. The revolution of the flat world revolves around technological advances where as the revolution that Humanism has influenced revolves around religious and philosophical life meanings. Change cannot occur until someone dares to be different and think outside of the box. We have more than our fair share of right brain thinkers in America today. Does the flat world have as much in store for us and will the outcome be as positive? We can only hope.

Hero Essay

Mr. Viles said to post this in the blog so that he could read it.. so well here it is...

Lisa Neal: Superwoman or Teacher?
Everyone should have a hero. We all need someone in our lives that we can look up to and respect. I, myself, have one such hero. In fact, some might even go so far as to call her a superhero. Yes, I know that when we think of a superhero we find ourselves picturing the generic comic book idea of a person that wears funny pants, a cape, and can fly. Though to my knowledge she can not fly, she has been known to wear some pretty funny pants and I bet that if you asked her nicely she would even model a cape for you. My hero, that just happens to be super, is Lisa Neal.
Lisa Neal, from a distance appears to be an ordinary 7th grade teacher that is involved with many extra curricular activities within the district. She has a fairly large family and spends many of her summers on the stage at a local theater. Thus, she appears to be a fairly decent person. However, take the time to meet her and you will soon find that she is anything but an ordinary woman. She excels on every stage that she chooses to set foot on, whether it be at the local theater or in the classroom. I, personally, have seen her perform on both stages and do not believe that there is another person out there that could fulfill either role as well as she does.
Lisa Neal was my 7th grade social studies teacher. No one student could even begin to accurately describe the first impression that this woman will have on you. Perhaps, the most memorable moment in her classroom was when she showed up to school dressed as Ben Franklin. She acted out a small skit and wrapped the entire class into how dangerous it was for these men to be participating in the signing of The Declaration of Independence. Another wonderful trait that she possesses is the ability to have her class hanging on her every word. Up until that year if anyone had asked me “do you believe it to be possible for a teacher to have complete control over a classroom without yelling?” I would have responded with “nope it is not possible”. She makes it possible. Just one disappointed look from her and even the worst of the worst immediately cease all that they are doing. As a teacher, Lisa Neal makes an everlasting impression on all of her students.
I believe that the biggest impression she has ever made on me occurred during my 8th grade year. I began experimenting with things of which children in middle school should never experiment with. As the year progressed, the level of hope amongst my friends, family, and teachers only seemed to drop further and further down the scale. She alone seemed to be the only one still standing that had any hope left. Without this woman I honestly believe that I never would have turned my life back around to the extreme extent that I have. I know for certain that I never would have taken honors classes at the high school. Whatever the situation a student of hers may be in, she will appear by their side with an infinite amount of hope.
At our 8th grade graduation she sang Mariah Carey’s song “Hero”. It could not have been more appropriate. At the end of my 8th grade year she made me promise to email her twice a week until I graduate. Though at the time I thought her to be utterly insane, everyone knows better than to contradict her of all people. By the beginning of 9th grade the emails had already flourished from twice a week to twice a day. To this day her quiet expectations still produce motivation and her lines of non-judgmental communication still remain open 24-7-365. This means more to me and so many others than could ever be stated in a single essay.
Lisa Neal is by far one polychromatic woman. She is a talented thespian and a truly amazing teacher. You will never meet anyone as pliable, veracious, and considerate as her. She prefers to wear her heart on her sleeve and compassion flows from her like water from a creek in the spring. She is a complex woman of many trades but above all she is my hero.
Ashley Nichols

The World is Flat post 6

I found this to be a truly amazing book. I learned a lot that I had heard rumors about or had seen on the news but had never had any real knowledge of. The flat world has a huge impact on everyone, even me and how I communicate with friends after and during school. According to this book I am pretty much on the right track as far as my future plans go. If I stay on my current path my career choice should be fairly "untouchable". All in all I find the flat world at the present date to be an amazing place and I believe that it will continue to be just as amazing as long as we do not begin to take matters too far.

All in all I found this to be a really informative and useful book. I am a better informed American citizen because of it. Friedman seemed to remain unbiased the entire book and it seems as though he definitely wants people to embrace the flat world. I found it to be rather insulting that he just skipped over all of the American people that had lost their jobs to outsourcing without a care. But other than that it was a decent read.

Everyday I take advantage of the flat world. I enjoy the cell phone service and it is a major way to keep in touch with all of my friends through text messaging. You can accommodate almost all of your needs through a computer. After school and extra-curricular activites, I can come home hop on the computer, look up my assignments, complete them all through Microsoft Office, send an email to my mentor, and then log on to instant messenger to chat with all of my friends that are bound to be doing the same things. During the day if I need to briefly inform my mother of some sort of news I can send her a text message from my phone to hers so that we are both on the same page. Lets face it, the two and half hours that I spend on a bus every day would be simply torturous without my iPod, providing me with access to all of my favorite songs and games at my fingertips.

According to Friedman my future should be fairly "untouchable". He uses the word to describe jobs that can not be shipped overseas to foreign countries for their workers to do at cheaper rates. He says that any "specialized" job can not be shipped over to China for their laborers to do. He says that these are people such as Michael Jordan and J.K. Rowling. While I will most likely never fall into this category I probably will fall into another he describes as being "untouchable". I plan to get my bachelors degree in teaching and go on to get my masters in school counseling so I can be a middle school guidance counselor. Friedman says that "untouchable" careers are also careers that are "localized and anchored. This category includes many, many people. They are untouchable because their jobs must be done in a specific location, either because they involve some specific local knowledge or because they require face-to-face, contact or interaction with a customer, patient, colleague, or audience". Being a middle school level guidance counselor does require face-to-face contact and interaction with all of your students, therefore someone in China or India would have an awfully hard time filling the position.

In short I believe that the flat world is something that we should embrace. Without technological developments we would stay in the same mind state forever and human interaction would never grow. Now it is just as simple to have a best friend in Japan as it is to have one two states away. I would be beside myself without all of my small pieces of technology that I carry around. Sometimes development in this area can be taken too far and you can lose sight of the purpose, but for the most part growing and learning together as a world instead of a country I believe can and will be very beneficial.

The World is Flat post 5

The question on the minds of most readers from the very beginning of this book is, is the flat world a good thing for America? This is a complex question that we see even Friedman struggle to answer and the answers that he does provide us with are purely speculation. The flat world will have a different impact on each American family. The question that seems to be asked the most is "what will happen to our jobs?" Everyone would like to hear that they will be safe in the future and will always be able to provide for their families. However, due to outsourcing, many of our digital or factory jobs are being sent overseas. Due to their weak economies and huge populations China, India, Europe, and Japan are willing to put in the time and labor for a fraction of the price of American workers.

Friedman tells us that this is a temporary problem. He says that "as the Chinese economy opens up to the world and reforms, the wages of Chinese knowledge workers will rise up to American/world levels." So Friedman believes that overtime these economies will open up and their labor prices will rise to that of ours long before Americas economy could ever possibly come crashing down. He also notes that as Americans we may lose some of our jobs to them now but that it is essential to just keep moving through because it will all change soon enough. This puts the mind of the average American to rest. They have now been reassured that we will all have jobs in the future and that our economy will not be taking a nose dive any time soon.

However, for several family's this does not provide any reassurance at all. Many people have already lost their jobs and been thrown out on the streets with a simple "nice working with you". My dad worked at Dexter Shoe for 20 years and they threw him and everyone else at the factory out so they could ship the company over to China. At this point my dad was 40 and forced to go on to college to simply be able to provide for his family. The state pitched in and in the end it worked out okay. For my grandmother however, things were not quite so great. She had worked at the factory for 36 years and was now too old to go back to college. By the time she could graduate it would be close to time for her to retire. So though Friedman's speculations are enough for most people, for some it is not nearly enough.

The World is Flat post 4

In The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, Friedman shows us many positive outcomes for flat world but in doing so we stumble upon a select few negative consequences as well. The world seems to have become a much less personal place. A man that Friedman interviewed for his book happened to be a salesman and he stated that his sales were beginning to drop because he can no longer connect as well with his clients. Everything is done digitally even sales so salesmen are beginning to have a lot more trouble relating on a personal level with their clients before making a sales pitch.

Often times a lot of confusion can come with the lack of human interaction. At one point in the book we are told of Friedman's frustration as he tries to get a phone number from a robotic answering system. However I am sure that the managers of the company will not pay much attention to a few peoples frustration levels when it comes down to pay day. It is much cheaper to keep a computer operator working than it is to keep an actual person on the phones all day long. To this Friedman says "because when you take the middle man out of business, when you totally flatten your supply chain, you also take a certain element of humanity out of life."

Technology is improving our world in several ways and making everyday life much easier for all of us. However, I fear that we are beginning to lack when it comes to human interaction. We have gone from person to person interaction, to person to computer, to what is now computer to computer. As technology continues to advance even further I am sure that this is not going to be getting any better anytime soon.

The World is Flat post 3

In chapter three of The World Is Flat we see Friedman using the word "convergence" a great deal. Friedman uses this word to describe when several major technological developments come together to make the world what he would call a "flatter" place. He lists three major "convergences". The first is when work flow software and hardware came together to create a single machine that could do multiple handy office tasks such as copying, faxing, and scanning. The second is the same technology being offered all around the world so that everyone is on an even playing field. The third and final "convergence" is that of several country's. Places like China and the U.S. that at one point were very much separated now inter-connect without a problem. Friedman is just using this word to mean the coming together of many ideas.

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?