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Opinion
Staying Middle Class (Or Don’t Cede Any Century to a Country that Censors Google)
7/12/2006
By Terry Calhoun
Thomas L. Friedman addressed the assembled 4,000+ attendees at the Campus of the Future Conference on the morning of Monday, July 10. Friedman, author of the influential book, The World Is Flat, provided a condensed and vigorous summary of the key points of his thinking in the book and shared some additional thoughts of interest to educators.
Friedman delineates three eras of “globalization” in human history.
Globalization 1.0: This era took place up until the 1800s and involved countries themselves globalizing through conquest and colonization. During this time, the world moved from being XXL to a size medium.
Globalization 2.0: This era is from the 1800s until 2000 and involved globalization through the activities of corporate and commercial interests. During this time the world moved from a size medium to a size small.
Globalization 3.0 has been happening since 2000 and has resulted in the world becoming “tiny.” Globalization 3.0 flattened the economic playing field and “requires individuals to globalize themselves and to see themselves as competing and collaborating as individuals with individuals anywhere around the world.”
What happened? Friedman says ten factors were involved in this flattening:
(1) At about the same time as the Iron Curtain fell, Microsoft published Windows. “Wall down, Windows up.”
(2) In 1995 Netscape went public, the Internet bubble that popped up from that move resulted in unintentional, even accidental, investment into more optical fiber network being installed than was needed. So everyone could get connected via that fiber and its speed can be upgraded over time without digging into the ground.
(3) Then came what Friedman calls the “workflow software revolution.” Many SCUPers will remember that, over just a few years, multiplatform, multisoftware interoperability became standard and suddenly people could share their digital files and work over that optical fiber network.
The next six factors all involve the development and acceptance of various forms of collaboration:
Outsourcing
Offshoring
Uploading
Open Source
Insourcing
Informing
The tenth factor is what Friedman calls the “steroids;” forceful productivity multipliers like nearly ubiquitous wireless, VOIP, and file-sharing, all of which supercharged the various forms of collaboration.
These complementarities all converged around 2000 at what he calls the “Mother of All Inflection Points.” What has happened since then is a radical change from vertical command-and-control operating structure to horizontal and collaborative organization structures. For example:
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