Book: The World Is Flat

Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Title: The World Is Flat

Here's another book by Thomas Friedman, author of 'The Lexus And The Olive Tree', which I blogged about a few days back. And very much like 'The Lexus And The Olive Tree', 'The World Is Flat' discusses about globalisation, but with a different focus.

In this book, Friedman explores the different phenomenons that have helped shape (or in this words, flatten) the vastly-connected world today. He lists ten different forces that have helped made the world a smaller, faster-paced world, and explores in great depth how these ten processes come together to create the globalised world we see today (The Triple Convergenge), with large fibre-optic networks and low barriers to trade, etc.

Included in the front section of the book are many examples, and Friedman investigates how these different factors contribute to the flattening process. He looks at self-regulating communities like Wikipedia, where people freely contribute, edit, and refine their contributions to build a massive online database without pay. The effects of blogging and other web activities are also discussed in rather great detail.

Friedman then zooms into America, looking at how the flattened world has affected the American job industry, as well as how they might protect certain industries from being 'outsourced, digitized, or automated'. He cites examples of how air-ticketing has evolved into a Do-It-Yourself process - a process that reduces the need for ticketing counters - and how housewives are able to work from home for call-centres who redirect phonecalls from all over the world to.. well, all over the world - don't be suprised the person answering your call might be from the other side of the globe.

Friedman then ends off the book with refrence to 9/11, and how an efficient world for the capitalist also means a more effecient world the terrorism. He might sound a little too alarmist at times, but fact is Osama relied on the Internet to plan his attack.

'The World Is Flat' is essentially an extension of 'The Lexus And The Olive Tree'. I personally found the book a little repetitive, with alot of ideas from his previous book. It can get a tad boring when you see the same phrases over and over again, but it still is quite a good read.

Click here if you want a copy from Amazon.com