Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
BOX 6.1
GLOBALIZATION ACCORDING TO
FRIEDMAN
For Friedman globalization is the world becoming 'flat' as a
natural and direct outcome of the technological changes associ-
ated with global information and communications technologies
(ICTs). These technologies have not only changed the ways in
which people are able to communicate with each other, but also
have increased the number and the global distribution of people
with whom we are easily able to communicate. This enormous
increase not only in the level of mass-communication possibilities
across the globe, but also in the speed of such communications
implies that we increasingly observe a greater degree of similar-
ity and an increasing degree of cultural homogeneity between
people in different parts of the world. The reason is that increas-
ing numbers of people are able to engage in dialogue with one-
another. Friedman bases his argument on ten epoch-making
technological and political phenomena which he interprets as
having fundamentally and irreversibly changed global society.
These ten exceptional phenomena are: the fall of the Berlin Wall;
the advent of the world wide web; the development of work-flow
software; the advent of uploading and file sharing; the advent of
outsourcing; the rise of offshoring; the development of supply-
chaining; the rise of third-party dedicated internal logistics opera-
tions; the rise of information availability via search engines; and
the development of wireless technology. Friedman argues that,
since the Millennium, the combined impacts of these ten phe-
nomena have rapidly been re-shaping the world in a way which is
both qualitatively and quantitatively different from previous eras
of globalization.
In Friedman's hypothesis, the three eras of globalization
are characterized and distinguished primarily by the behav-
ioural emphasis on the country, the firm and the single
individual respectively. Through the lens of these apparently-
changing behavioural perspectives, which Friedman sees
as being made possible by technological and institutional
changes, he then argues that we have already embarked on a
new era of globalization by which the whole world is increas-
ingly becoming flatter. As such, we would move towards a world
with rapidly diminishing differences between people in different
