snowdeal.org - conflux: The New York Review of Books: The World Is Round

conflux

The New York Review of Books: The World Is Round

The New York Review of Books The World Is Round

"Friedman's by now famous discovery of the world's flatness came to him when he was talking to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of one of India's leading new high-technology companies, Infosys Technologies, at its campus in Bangalore. The Indian entrepreneur remarked to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." The observation is commonplace, but it hit Friedman with the force of a revelation. "What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened.... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!" Five hundred years ago, Columbus "returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round." As a matter of fact it was not Columbus who provided the proof but the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose ship circled the globe in a three-year voyage from 1519 to 1522. Regardless, Friedman sees himself as a latter-day Columbus who has discovered that the world is no longer round: "I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.'"

The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat."

Wired Magazine Why the World Is Flat
"This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind."

The New York Times Global Playing Field: More Level, but It Still Has Bumps
[requires 'free' registration]

"Mr. Friedman is right that there are forces flattening the world, but there are other forces making it less flat. At issue is the balance between them. So is the world really much flatter than before?"

"Meanwhile, the new ''rules of the game'' that were part of the last round of global trade negotiations -- notably intellectual property regulations requiring all countries to adopt American-style patent and copyright laws -- are almost surely making the playing field less level. They will make it easier for those who are ahead of the game to maintain their lead."

New York Press FLATHEAD: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.
"On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is."

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::
5:24 PM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

[ outbound ]

conflux

The New York Review of Books: The World Is Round

0 Comments:

[ rhetoric ]

[ search ]

[ outbound ]

[ schwag ]

[ et cetera ]