Thomas Friedman is a well-known editorialist from The New York Times and three times laureate of Pulitzer Nobel prize with his book “ The World is Flat : A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”, an original essay about globalization and the flattening of the world that is resulting.
The title of this book refers to a view of the world that is controlled by commerce where all competitors have an equal opportunity.
According to him, we are living in a flattened world without commercial and politic borders anymore with the effect of globalization and numerical revolution. He sustains that flattening forces, essentially linked to technical progress, are converging and act together since 2000 to create a new playfield world. By the explosions of new technologies, we entered in a new phase of connectivity based on delocalization and outsourcing which took a non-negligible importance. Search engines are now, like Google, Yahoo or MSN search, the way that permits to people to collaborate and get information anywhere and anytime. And that is his state of judgment.
That has a lot of consequences: persons who benefited, before, of this globalization have changed because of those evolutions. Countries of Asia used to be poor, and were considered as countries on the way of development. Thus, knowledge was not recognized the same as in Boston and in Beijing or Bangalore because this last one will never have the possibility to take the advantage of his trainee and so, his knowledge. To be recognized as a professional to its value, an Asiatic has to emigrate to American or European countries. But that has changed. And, Occident cannot triumph as he did, because the center of the world is moving to Asia where entrepreneurs are investing and they have in a sort overtaken Occident. Occident has now to worry about Asia, like countries of the B.R.I.C. (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) power increasing.
I think they have been surprised by this emergement and do not have