The Digital Society

                It’s funny, I’ve been resistant to starting a blog, now my hands are tied and in order to get a grade for my Digital Society class I have to conform. Hopefully, at the very least, I can make it entertaining. For this class, I’ve been reading the book, The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman. It’s a very in depth look at technology in the world, and how we got to where we are from where we were.

                I have to admit, the first few pages didn’t compel me to stay up late and keep reading, however Friedman does a phenomenal job describing outsourcing from the other side of the world. He tells about a time when he was in an Indian call center that handles everything from credit cards to appointment confirmations. Whenever I get a call, right around dinner time, from someone with a thick Punjabi accent my first response is to frustration, I’ve never thought about the reasons behind why it’s always Indian folk on the other end of the line.

                Friedman talks about Globalization phases 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Basically, all three are time periods where someone changed the world and made it more reachable to the rest of the world. Globalization 1.0 took place from the years 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, to around 1800. In this time period the world shrank from size large to size medium. The shrinking was caused by brawn, and power, and how your country used it.

                The first part of globalization 2.0, which went from years 1800-2000, was all about the falling costs of transportation due to new inventions, the car and steam engine. The second half of the era was powered by the falling costs of communication. PC’s and telephones, and the internet were all created in this time period. The world shrank from size medium to size small. With the advancements in transportation and communication, we saw the birth of a global economy. We could now ship products and goods around the world.

                In globalization 3.0, from the years 2000 to present, advances in technology jump by leaps and bounds. Now it’s all about the individual. Any person with access to a computer and internet can collaborate and compete in a global scale. This era shrank the world from small to very small. The first two eras were driven and forced by the United States and England, the latest version is very much being driven by influences outside the U.S., areas like India, Japan and China.

                Friedman talks about certain events in history that caused the world to become a more level playing field, which is actually the basis on why he calls the world flat. The first event that caused the world to start flattening out was the fall of the Berlin wall. To Friedman one of the biggest triumphs of the wall coming down was that democracy won. The capitalist economic system defeated its counterpart and polar opposite in communism. Now it was time for everyone to orient themselves to it. Now the world could be viewed as one global market, a single community. The fall of the Berlin wall stimulated other outbreaks, it empowered those people on the bottom and weakened the ones on top. The fall of the Berlin wall paved the way for common standards to be adopted, like how economies should be run, how accounting and banking should be done.

                The final piece in this part of the 77 page puzzle was a chapter on Netscape. I remembered back when I was a kid, watching the Netscape icon rotate in the http bar when the site was being loaded. Little did anyone know that the development of that browsing system would change technology and how we interact with people forever. Netscape not only brought the internet to life but made it accessible to everyone, from the ages of five to ninety five. When Netscape was first developed the creators asked you to pay for it, if you could, if not please still use it. That notion seemed like a backwards way of thinking but they knew that if everyone used it, it would stimulate massive growth. Netscape also forced the hand of PC manufacturers to keep the World Wide Web an “open protocol” so not one company could lay claim to the internet and force people to buy their PCs in order to get it. Netscape also made it possible for people all over the world to communicate regardless of the PC they had. Each PC had a different operating system that couldn’t communicate with different brands of PCs and Netscape cleared a path to be able to locate information put on the web from anyone, anywhere.