Friedman's Flatteners

In the year 2000 our world entered the new millennium and what is called Globalization 3.0 with a focus on groups and individuals. The forces or flatteners that lead us to this can be illustrated by Tom Friedman’s Ten Flatteners. His Ten Flatteners are: 1. fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, 2. Netscape goes public on August 9, 1995, 3. Development of work-flowed software, 4. Uploading, 5. Outsourcing, 6. Offshoring, 7. Supply chaining, 8. Insourcing, 9. Informing and 10. The steroids. To me there were three flatteners that were the most significant: Netscape going public, uploading and the steroids. First I feel Netscape going public is significant because it made the World Wide Web popular to everyone. The internet has become a huge tool for every person in the world to communicate, get information and stay connected. I personally cannot imagine the world today with the World Wide Web. The second flattener I feel is most significant is uploading. Uploading has made it possible for anyone to be able to create content and post it to the web. This has revolutionized the way we get information because virtually anything can be posted to the web for the rest of the world to access. One huge example of this is a website like Wikipedia, where it allows people to create page on anything and allows people to update the information to keep it as current as possible. The last flattener I feel is the most significant is what Tom Friedman called “the steroids”. The steroids refers to computing, instant messaging, file sharing, wireless technologies, voice over internet protocol, video conferencing and computing graphics which has improved all of the other flatteners. Instant messaging has allowed people to communicate faster than ever before and with wireless technology it has allowed people to communicate not only faster but anywhere. Now everyone in the world can text or instant message someone and get a response almost immediately. It has allowed business to have meetings with anyone in the world no matter where they are with video chats thus making the business world expand even more. These flatteners have changed the world like no one could have ever imagined and there is no sign for technology to stop growing anytime soon.