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.
