| ||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered, Friedman argues, not for military conflicts or political events, but for a whole new age of globalization – a ‘flattening’ of the world. The explosion of advanced technologies now means that suddenly knowledge pools and resources have connected all over the planet, levelling the playing field as never before, so that each of us is potentially an equal – and competitor – of the other. The rules of the game have changed forever – but does this ‘death of distance’, which requires us all to run faster in order to stay in the same place, mean the world has got too small and too flat too fast for us to adjust? Friedman brilliantly demystifies the exciting, often bewildering, global scene unfolding before our eyes, one which we sense but barely yet understand. The World is Flat is the most timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and its discontents, powerfully illuminated by a world-class writer.
In his new chapters: 'If It's Not Happening, It's Because You're Not Doing It' and 'What Happens When We All Have Dog's Hearing?' the author explores both the benefits and disadvantages of the very latest developments in global communication. The emergent popularity of blogging, pod-casting, YouTube and MySpace enable the modern world citizen to broadcast their views to a potential audience of billions, and the proliferation of Internet access to even the poorest communities gives everyone who wants to the tools to address issues of social injustice and inequality. On the other hand the technology that seems to improve communication on a global scale causes it to deteriorate on a local scale. Identifying ours as 'The Age of Interruption', Friedman discusses the annoyance and dangers of BlackBerrys in meeting rooms, hands-free kits in conversation and using a phone or iPod whilst driving. In an age when we are always 'connected' via email or mobile phone how can we hope to concentrate on one thing without interruption? As expected the author has revitalised this new edition of The World Is Flat with timely insights into the nature of our flat world.
About the Author
Thomas Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at The New York Times. He is the author of two best-selling books, From Beirut to Jerusalem, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith; and furthermore directed that I should not proceed by land to the East, as is customary, but by a Westerly route, in which direction we have hitherto no certain evidence that anyone has gone. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith; and furthermore directed that I should not proceed by land to the East, as is customary, but by a Westerly route, in which direction we have hitherto no certain evidence that anyone has gone. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Verbose but stimulating,
This review is from: The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century (Paperback)
Yes, this is very much a US-centric book, with plenty of criticism towards the US nevertheless. It is aimed at an American audience and it does not claim to be the definitive work on China or India.
Yes, it is verbose and brimming with personal anecdotes sometimes masquerading as hard data. But it still presents the enormous revolution -- a series of extraordinary events that have converged -- that is so overwhelming and rapid that most of us simply have not had time to even begin to process what is happening to us. You may not agree with everything he says -- including the solutions he suggests -- but this book is well worth reading. You don't have to agree with everything he says, and it is superficial in parts. Nevertheless I am certain that Americans and Western Europeans would be challenged by this book. As a Career Counselor, I think there is much food for thought about the world of work and skills needed in tomorrow's marketplace ... which will be here much sooner than we think.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A More Rounded View,
By
This review is from: The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century (Paperback)
Other Amazon readers' reviews put me right off this book (all over in 10 pages etc). But my boss asked me to read it, so I persevered. I'm glad I did. Despite the 569 pages (not including anything so outmoded as a bibliography), and despite the many and often very lengthy examples and case-studies, not to mention the long quotes from other writers, there are important messages in this book. It's a good speed-read, if you get my drift. I recommend it on that basis.
Freidman makes a bold claim. Around 2000 a triple convergeance occurred which created a new historical era. Ten flatteners (i.e. changes) created a new, flatter, global playing field. Businesses and individuals (especially would-be zippies from India, China and the former Soviet Union) began to move from vertical to horizontal ways of creating value (i.e. doing business). People suddenly gained access to the flat world platform. Walls, ceiling and floors blew away. Out went command and control. In came connect and collaborate. Noone knows anymore who is exploiting who. Our jobs are being digitalized, automated and outsourced. To survive as a new untouchable middler you'd better become a great orchestrator, synthesizer, explainer, leverager, adapter, or a passionate personaliser. Failing that, just be brilliant, like Madonna or a cancer specialist. Failing that, just be well anchored, like a dustman. Ok, I parody rather than paraphrase. Readable it always isn't. But that's got most of the bad stuff out of the way. Not all the quotes are bad: "It is a difference of degree so great - of low-cost interconnectivity, of individual empowerment, of global newworks for collaboration - that it is a difference in kind." This it least a bold and stimulating claim which is worthy of examination. Freidman's central case is that in the first great age of globalisation, it was countries/ governments who first began to establish global collaborative links. Then it was companies. Now it's individuals. To put it another way, we've gone from hunting, to agriculture, to manufacturing industry, to services, to services delivered globally. To put it really badly, in a phrase that irritatingly won't leave my head, the Berlin Wall has become the Berlin Mall. But aside from the central thesis there are some illuminating passages. Friedman gave me a lot of insight into terrorists. Typically, they are young, male, well-educated but also alienated by impersonal global economic changes and forces which affront their personal and cultural dignity and threaten their identity. Freidman calls them "neo-Leninists" and compares them with their 19th century European counterparts, the violent liberal, Marxist or anarchist revolutionaries, educated, middle class but displaced by industrialisation. This is a real historical insight. Also useful is the account of how terrorists utilise the new global platform. Bin Laden and friends used the internet to create their sinister and deadly "airline." The e bay praise points system is also interestingly analysed, as is the history of the anti-globalisation movement. Freidman is not as naive about the new globalisation as some reviewers claim. He sees the dangers, of which the "Virtual Caliphate" is only one. But globalisation needn't mean Americanisation. It needn't destroy cultural identities because crucially, he argues, we can upload as well as download. The local can go global. We can all be players. In what should be read as the companion volume, Evelyn Waugh's satire on journalism, "Scoop" (1939), inept foreign correspondents communicate from Africa to home via hilariously garbled telegrams. More global communication is probably not an unqualified good. But how great is the opposite? But has the new connectivity really created Freidman's new global historical era? Waugh warns "of the innuendo and intricate misrepresentations, the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary history", not to mention "the positive, daring lies that got a chap a rise of screw." Maybe the world isn't flat. But read this book anyway to learn more about what's been happening globally in the past five minutes. Which is quite a lot. Please excuse me now, time to upload.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
unbelievably trivial,
This review is from: The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century (Paperback)
Nothing but empty calories, fancy dressed-up metaphors, repetitions, and silly ranting. Having read Chang Ha-Joon's wonderful book Bad Samaritans, I decided to check out if this book was really as bad as Ha-Joon says. And, well, it is.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
