Book Review: "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century"

The other day, I did a live chat with a Vonage support person who identified herself as “Jennifer.” She was smart, she was helpful, she was patient, and she answered all my questions. Because Vonage has live chat support, and because Jennifer impressed me as someone who knew her stuff, I’ve switched from Skype to Vonage. (More about that in another post.)

I have to wonder, though, if Jennifer is her real name. These days, it’s quite likely that her real name is Arabic or Hindi or Mandarin, and she’s chatting online with me from her cubicle in Bangalore, India, or Pakistan or Hong Kong.

I read Thomas L. Friedman’s bestselling book “The World is Flat” a few months ago. (I’m waiting for his newest book, “Flat, Hot and Crowded” to arrive at my local library.) Published in 2005, “Flat” is a description of Friedman’s voyage of discovery into the matrix of the digitalized global economy.

It’s a fascinating trip. Friedman details how technology and especially the internet have, in his opinion, irrevocably broken down both trade and employment barriers, creating a “new world order” that is largely commercial, not political, though it is increasingly affecting politics. From people printing their own plane tickets off the internet, to the send-money-anywhere-in-the-world convenience of Pay Pal, from open-sourcing to outsourcing, from Wal-Mart’s moment-to-moment control of its inventory to FedEX’s moment-to-moment knowledge of the location of every package it handles, from Google as world-wide library to Google as targeted-advertising giant, the digitalized flow of information has changed everything, and Friedman provides a detailed and fascinating description of that change.

In India, he found 2500-person call centers, with clusters of people answering questions for customers of Microsoft, Dell and innumerable credit card companies, highly educated, twenty-something kids identifying themselves and Joe or Susie or Bob to make the callers more comfortable. He talked with executives of Japanese companies now outsourcing their manufacturing to China. He describes a conversation with an online airline ticket agent who works out of her home in Salt Lake City, and while visiting Iraq, watched the operation of a camera-equipped surveillance drone controlled by an Army operator at an Air Force Base in Nevada. He describes news stories and interview pictures recorded on cell phones and transmitted to news websites for instant broadcast throughout the internet.

Then he gives a history of the ten "flatteners" that converged to create this new digitalized world, from the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 to the rise of mobile phones and virtual realities, and how everyone, from individual workers and consumers to global corporations, is being affected--and he provides this information in an example-rich style that’s fascinating.

If you want to understand how these changes are affecting you, I stongly recommend “The World Is Flat.”