Globalization

The book we are reading “The World is Flat” By. Thomas Friedman, is an interesting book so far. It is crazy to read this book about things I have known about but never thought about, until I started reading this book and it opened up my mind to how the world has changed and is still changing and how it affects us as Americans.

In this book Friedman talked about 3 different eras of Globalization and how each era affects the world making it smaller with each era. Globalization 1.0 began in 1492, opening trade between the Old World and the New World, until 1800. Globalization 2.0 lasted from 1800 to 2000 when multinationals companies went global for markets and labor. In this era in 1998 the internet and e-commerce just started taking off, and the connectedness of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly, because of this he says that around the year 2000 we entered a new era. Globalization 3.0: the flat world platform, the newfound power for people to work jointly with each other and to strive globally, including the rise of the telegraph, electronic communications, most remarkably mobile phones and the Internet, connecting world wide of people in new ways by the year 2010. With this era people had more opportunities to compete with other people all over the world, and this is flattening and shrinking the world.

According to Friedman the events which flattened the earth was the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall helped us to see the world differently, to see it as something better, Belin Wall was blocking are vision and thoughts on the world being a single market, ecosystem and community, “It was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future.” We just couldn’t think globally about the world.  Common standards create a flatter and level playing field. Windows- enable PC, along with the fall of the Wall, begun the whole flattening of our world.  Apple, Windows, IBM PCs and others gave us power, a way to communicate and get information in minutes.

  Netscape a web browser that allows you to create, organize, and link documents to make it easier for us to look at on the internet. The web could not be without the net, the net has programs to communicate between computers for the web. The net is useful because people want information, knowledge and wisdom and don’t have to know that much about computers. Netscape was a big part in the flattening force; it brought the internet alive, people started wanting to do other things on the internet and needing more computers, software, and networks.  Netscape is very important in our lives, jobs that can be done in an hour, would take a month. Being able to communicate with people out of the country is amazing to me, a lot of people world be lost without it.  I believe Netscape is Globalization 3.0 because it gave everyone the opportunity to upload to the cite directly, and to connect with each other around the world.