Friedman’s Discussion of Globalization and Flattening Essay

Globalization is regarded by its critics as a force which is extending the gap amidst the valets rich and poor. In some ways, this has been true, especially throughout the first decade of the post-Cold War Era. The opening of gateways to the East created a alliance between the embodied partners throughout the globe that concentrated the spoils of free-trade into the hands of the wealthy.But in Thomas Friedmans 2005 meditation on the topic, The World is Flat, there is evidence that in fact, the intend products of globalization such as a greater distribution of knowledge resources and a leveling of the technical playing field be beginning to surface. This last mentioned product of free trade, the leveling nub is that which informs Friedmans title theme. The world has pop off flat by its increasing smallness. The economic, political, cultural and tele-communicative interconnectivity of nations is gradually eroding some of the geographic obstacles to popular progress.The strand s of globalization, the New York Times journalist observes, have contributed to a coarseening of glide path to independent entrepreneurialship and opportunity. Though many of the subjects of the authors abridgment are large American multi-national corporations, there is an evident transition in which knowledge-based internet startup enterprises from across the globe are undermining the more monopolistic proclivities of the American market.In nations such as India and China, American exploitation of lower operational, environmental and labor-oriented costs in the technological sector has caused a proliferation of such resources to the general public. This, in turn, is becoming a hotbed of alternative market action which will ultimately dismantle the superiority of the American parsimoniousness. According to Friedmans analysis, a core harm to the U. S. economy, but a boon to independent operations overseas, has been a disregard for American private conceptions of property rights .From counterfeiting of American name brand consumer goods to pirate telecom infrastructural apparatuses, the bureaucratic vulnerabilities to effective globalization are numerous. Both partners in a free-trade circumstance stand to lose economic opportunity in the presence of such market subversions. Thomas Friedmans text is eye-opening insofar as so many of the matters which he discusses may be directly implicated in the experiences of our quotidian lives.In fact, this is the flattening principle of which the author speaks, dictating that the public experience rather than simply large institutional abstractions are shaping the context in which we live our lives. much(prenominal) is to suggest that the technological, educational, informational and recreational freedoms which have traditionally be reserved for those on the upper echelon of both their domestic setting and international geography are more and more becoming democratic. However, in contrast to Friedmans general tenor of optimism, his sarcasm and hints at the flow rate consequences of globalization for so many individuals.This discussion is a reflection on Friedmans text as informed by my let conception of globalization which brings future opportunity at the expense of current human dignity, personal satisfaction and even American prosperity. Therefore, the discussion will be oriented toward elucidating globalizations internally contradictory nature. Just as it enriches one demographic in a developing nation, it facilitates the targeted abuse of a nonher. Just as it endows us with a heretofore unseen capacity for self-sufficiency, it likewise robs us of the capacity to control the level of satisfaction which we achieve when relating to the commercial world.In the flattening of the global horizon that Friedman lauds as the eventual path to a shared sample of living and prosperity, there is the need for a greater analytical emphasis on the negative forces that are driving individuals to increa singly attempt to find their own pathways to social and commercial interaction. Friedmans discussion, as we will see, is focused on demonstrating the permeation of benefits to the collective world community in free trade. This is quite bearable from a macrolevel standpoint.Indeed, nations engaged in free trade would do well to support one another in a mutuality of benefit. Certainly, as was illustrated by the economic phenomena of the 1990s, the expansion of a single large market through a boom of technological progress will have the effect of disseminating to the rest of the free world. This was certainly proved to be true by the dynamic of that decade, when there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world. (Friedman, 6) The result is what is seen as surfacing today. More than the United States, it is the world community which is producing the knowledge workforce of the future. And though Friedman is forthcoming in making that foreboding case, it is important that we expound upon this subject further in this discussion by acknowledging that globalization and the flattening effect are not of a uniform pattern.Even as the proliferation which the author discusses is taking place, it has done so with a multitude of consequences that can neither said to have been desire nor can be said to have stimulated greater equality. Friedman, whom by his text we may suggest is a supporter of the ultimate purpose of globalization, makes the technological attribution that it was actually the coincidence of the dot-com boom and the Tele confabulations Act of 1996 that launched the fiber-optic bubble. (67) Friedman observes that the collective telecom industry invested roughly 1 trillion dollars in half a decade on wiring the world. (67) The deregulation in the 1996 American domestic legislation, which allowed so many larger companies to enforce ho stile consolidation measures in a vast array of theretofore legally unapproachable markets, would coincide with the unfettered capital investment in global internet penetration that has ultimately elevated private sector rights over public rights while simultaneously helping to bring other nations to an eventually greater infrastructural promotion of internet access than would be found in the United States.In some manner, this is borne out by a pattern with incredibly broad-based implications for American consumer and job markets. Today, we have seen and experience the wholesale transfer of our Customer Service industry to fledgling globalizing economies such as that in India. Here, major computer retailers, cable company floozies, wireless communication device providers, bank/credit cards merchants and virtually every other monopolistic corporate industry in America is forced to maintain its emulous advantages by commissioning outsourced Customer Service agents located in India. It is their charge to replicate the experience of an American mobiliseing a support technician with an intimate relationship with the product in question. This is accomplished with, as Friedman reveals, intensive training in the adoption of linguistic, dialectic and etiquette-related behaviors designed to facilitate comfort for the American caller. The Indian call center operators adopt Western names of their own choosing. The idea, of course, is to make their American or European customers feel more comfortable. (22) Amongst the many indicators that cultural flattening would play a part in this transition of labor, the concept of taking on an Americanized name in the interests of facilitating the core consumer target is not only remarkable but intensely objectionable from the outside perspective, particularly when this outside perspective is informed by the sense of autonomy and individuality typically affiliated with western philosophy.However, for the subjects described in Fried mans book, an aspect of the western philosophy perhaps more indicative of its cultural interest is the economic opportunity afforded to the hundreds of thousands of young Indian post-graduates competing for the chance to root phone calls from Americans concerned with all manner of technical support or target marketing. This relatively low-level and typically micro-managed field in America has become amongst the most competitive entry-level positions in India.And in one sense that Friedman captures in the theoretical framing of his text, this is an opportunity for personal economic mobility which for the young student in India might have been seen as extraordinary and rarified just a decade ago. This may hardly be said to be true today, where 245,000 Indians are answering phones 24 hours a day and charged with responsibility of representing themselves as being located somewhere in the United States. (24)From a personal perspective, this has produced an undreamed of dearth of qualit y service in the United States, where the usability of our products has become increasingly distant from the quality of the Customer Support which we have received. One of the qualities of our technology which Friedman believes has helped to denigrate the relevance of geographical distance to serviceability has been the institution of automated Customer Service. For those of us who have been transferred and given insufficient options for contending with specific categories of problem, this has hardly been an added convenience.And the infallibly polite computerized operator is equally as unflappable or emotionally unresponsive as is the outsourced Customer Service representative. In a particularly telling passage where Friedman observes a woman in an Indian call center as caller after caller hangs up the phone in rage, we can see that there is something about this experience that can be excruciating and even unfair. It may be noted that Friedman does a very effective job at distingu ishing between the economic, the sociological and the technological factors which have rendered our current level of global flatness.He acknowledges that there were world events which would make the type of collaboration now essential between the United States and India a natural matter of happenstance. Friedman describes the so-called Y2K crisis in which it was feared that a lack of programming foresight would result in the incorrect resetting of the worlds computer-based internal clocking mechanisms, creating the likelihood of widespread technical failure throughout the world.Thus, with Y2K bearing down on us, America and India started dating, and that relationship became a huge flattener, because it demo to so many different businesses that the combination of the PC, the Internet, and fiber-optic cables had created the possibility of a whole new for of collaboration horizontal value creation outsourcing. (108) So we mustiness yield to the fact that, truly, globalization can ha rdly be avoided. The scope of consumer need does truly require a greater scope of consumer service, and the Indian economy does have the correct workforce makeup to address this need.But when combined with the expansion of private rights, courtesy of such legislation as the 1996 Act, this has created a forbid sense for the consumer that flattening requires a considerable decline from the experiences to which Americans have grown accustomed. Perhaps the overarching presence in Friedmans text is the intimation that these factors which are impacting our lives and the affecting the demerit of world order are of an inevitable nature. The ten factors which are identified as the flattening mechanisms of the changing globe are largely technological and economic forces with broad social and cultural implications.However, these latter qualities are merely the secondary consequence of a circumstance committed to by former. Such is to say that the proliferation of western culture, though cert ainly not accidental, is merely incidental. Referring once again to the problematic case of outsourcing Customer Support services, we can see that the imposition of American culture is only due to the need to cater to the American consumer. In reality, though Indian culture is threatened by subversion, it is American culture which is being co-opted for reasons having little to do with cultural expression.As a result, the American identity has been trivialized and largely represented as being tantamount to the conveyance of commercial interest. One of the core revelations offered by this text, at least when placed in the context of the general Americans everyday experience, is that the flattening which has occurred must necessarily come at the expense of the Americans staunch sense of individuality and belief in personal entitlement.Works Cited Friedman, T. (2005). The World is Flat A Brief History of the 21st Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.