The World is Flat 2012

When I used to hear “the earth is flat”, what normally came to mind was Christopher Columbus freaking out the crews of three little ships heading across the Atlantic, or even the infamous Flat Earth Society, often lampooned and now themselves sellouts to the global marketplace. Since around 2005, though, I think of Thomas Friedman’s, The World is Flat. First released in 2005, then again in 2006, and finally again in 2007 (Version 3.00): The world is flat; The earth is flat; Flat globalization. The list of “flat” goes on and on and on. While Friedman is the target of many attacks, one thing is for certain: he may not have started the conversation on globalization, but he took it mainstream. He owns the “the world is flat.” Soon after the publishing of the first edition, education followed suit and the “flat schools” and “flat classrooms” discussions occupied the conference scene (I had quite a nice presentation circuit in education conferences in the Asia/Pacific in the mid-2000’s with it, so thank you Mr. Friedman). So why resurrect a discussion on a book that was last updated in 2007? Because while a lot has changed since then (a scant five years), the discussion (and predictions) are still happening!

The first exposure many educators had to idea of “the world is flat” didn’t come from reading the book, but from a PowerPoint presentation posted on YouTube in 2006 now in a Wiki called Shift Happens. The presentation was originally for a faculty meeting at Arapahoe High School in a suburb of Denver. Since that original posting, it has been viewed over 5 million times (I still use Did You Know Version 2.0 in educational technology workshops, too). A high school faculty presentation starting a world wide educational movement rather speaks to the idea that the world might indeed be a tad flat. Shift Happens. The idea that the world is changing very quickly and that geography isn’t nearly the barrier it used to be. Sounds flat. Also inspired by the first version of The World Is Flat, two teachers (both Americans) linked their classrooms in the United States and Bangladesh and from that experience created the Flat Classroom Project. Friedman went on in the next editions of the book to mention their project (in chapter 13). 2012 and the site is still up and active and used by educators all over the world. “How flat is your classroom” is a question (and title of the article) from Education Leadership and goes on to provide resources for “flattening” the classroom. The idea that “the world is flat” is now education mainstream, too.

This first chapter in the books is “While I Was Sleeping.” So what happened while Friedman was sleeping, and more importantly, what has happened since 2007 when he “woke up”? Friedman starts the book with a journey to India. He is amazed at the business from America being outsourced there, and not just call centers. Call centers were obvious – even in 2005 Americans were getting used to the idea of speaking to someone from India to book a flight or get technical help hooking up a printer. But there were also software developers, accounting firms, and even virtual personal assistants. Pretty incredible. He broke down what he calls three stages of Globalization (1.0, 2.0, and 3.0) and gave explanations on how it was possible that Americans could do business inexpensively with India in real time. Globalization 3.0 is our current stage and has been made possible by the huge investments by the United States in telecommunication infrastructure. All pretty interesting and for the time, not something the mainstream was talking about. So what has happened since then? There seems to be an industry of “the world is not flat” authors, dedicated to pointing out that the world is NOT flat. That is not to say that Friedman was right on every point and many of the disagreements others have are well founded. Soon after the publication of The World is Flat, Atlantic Monthly followed up with a 2005 article, The World Is Spiky. Clever name and some good points that the world, while leveling, is really “spiky” with concentrations of people and resources in only parts of the world. In seven years, though, some of the major premises of the article, especially on the world economy, are now wrong. The author states, “Together New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston have a bigger economy than all of China.” Certainly not an accurate statement in 2012. What could have caused this shift to happen (pardon the pun)? Even in an op ed article from a few days ago, The World is not flat, a professor vehemently disagrees with Friedman. Introducing the article he writes, “Thomas Friedman is wrong to say in his celebrated book, “The World is Flat,” that the world is always within one’s reach, or just a click away with the use of a mouse.” Taking the view of The World Is Spiky, the professor describes the millions of people living in poverty that do not have access to the resources that create a flat world. While I agree with the professor on his points on poverty (and misallocated resources), I don’t think Friedman meant “the world is flat for every single person in the world.” Here is the irony with that article: it was written in the Philippines and I read it in the United States. Flat. More irony? Friedman wrote about Indian call centers taking McDonald’s drive through orders in middle America in 2005. In trying to find out if this trend was still happening (which I never did), I read that Philippine call centers have overtaken Indian call centers for American clients. Yet even more irony? I read two articles on this. The first from the Times of India called Philippines beats India to emerge as leader is call centre business, and the second from the New York Times called New Capital of Call Centers…both written by the same author in India. Just five years from the last publication and shift happened again…this time from India to the Philippines. NBC’s short lived sitcom, Outsourced, about an American working in an Indian call center might be resurrected to have the same show take place in the Philippines.

Plenty of critics have come out of the woodwork to take aim at Mr. Friedman. In a scathing article, Friedman Aflame, National Review takes aim to say, “Tom Friedman claims to be simplifying complex ideas and making them more understandable. But what he is in fact doing is taking an already simple idea and making it meaningless (Goldberg, 2010).” Harsh criticism while the article acknowledges in Friedman’s own words that he doesn’t really believe the earth is flat (in the sense of true globalization. He states, “Of course the world is not flat. But it isn’t round anymore either. I have found that using the simple notion of flatness to describe how more people can plug, play, compete, connect, and collaborate with more equal power than ever before – which is what is happening in the world – really helps people who are trying to understand the essential impact of all the technological changes coming together today (Goldberg, 2010).” National Review doesn’t like Friedman. Big shock, but the attacks come from scholars, too. In a historical analysis, the author of The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of the empire, takes on Friedman as if he suggests that the world is moving to a level playing field and will reach some sort of equilibrium. “Friedman’s arguments in his book and on his cover reflect a very powerful and prevalent view of globalization, a view that is similar to and derived from other grand narratives that are presented as inevitable and unlinear…I hope in this paper to destabilize and problematize the image of the inevitability and unilinearity of today’s flat earth (Domosh, 2010).” Did I miss something in Chapter 1 of Friedman’s book that somehow told me that the world was flat throughout history and was certainly flat today? No. Did I need to read 18 pages to figure that out? Although it was an interesting historical perspective, why call Friedman out on this (a good title, perhaps?).
A good example to see the flattening world is to look at shifts in education. In 2004 a hedge fund manager, Salman Khan started tutoring his family over the Internet using YouTube. It took off to become a hugely successful non-profit of the Khan Academy  with over 3,000 tutorial videos covering a huge range of topics. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers up entire courses for free through it’s OpenCourseWare project . Just last fall, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun created a free class, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and over 350,000 people from all over the world registered! It has led to Stanford creating a new program, Staford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) http://see.stanford.edu. Not to be outdone in the flattening of education, Harvard has is now offering free online courses, as well. Some in academia (the scholarly world of ivory towers) admit that their world is not flat yet, but moving there, as Peter Felten did in Teaching, Learning, and Globalisation(sic). Regardless of what we think of flattening (in terms of education access), it is happening.

In Terrie Norris’s, The World is Flat – And That’s Okay, (from a completely unrelated field from mine), in the trade journal, Professional Safety, she mentions how her own field and how information and access are coming from many other places than just the United States. Her own contact book and social networking like LinkedIn are now international (Norris, 2011). My own Facebook, LinkedIn, etc are full of people from the United States (my home), but also countries from all over the Asia and Pacific. I regularly Skype and conduct webinars to places halfway around the world as just a daily part of doing business. For myself, the world is flat. I recognize that not everybody has equal access to information, and even in America I know there are “information deserts.” The world is flat, but that doesn’t mean it is fair.

Works cited (that didn’t have web links):
Domosh, M. (2010). The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire. Progress in Human Geography. 34(4), 419-435.
Goldberg, J. (2010). Friedman AFLAME. National Review,  62(4), 38-41.
Norris, T. (2011). The world is flat – and that’s okay. Professional Safety. 56(11). 1-1.