Task 2)
Thomas Friedman’s lecture, The World is Flat, which he presented at Yale University
is a brief overview of the first three chapters of his book “The World is Flat: A Brief
History of the 21st Century”. Freidman begins his lecture by talking about how he
and his discovery team decided to go to Bangalore India to do a documentary on the
“other side of outsourcing”. After having compiled about 60 hours of interviews and
footage over the course of 10-11 days, Friedman describes how he had gotten
“sicker and sicker” and had a “dawning awareness that while he had been sleeping
something really big had happened in this globalization story and he had totally
missed it”. He did not notice or know how he didn’t realize individuals in foreign
countries were doing things, such as taxes, for American’s. During Friedman’s last
interview with the CEO of Infosys, the Microsoft of India, he was told that “the global
economic playing field is being leveled and you Americans are not ready.” He took
this to mean the world is flat and his take on globalization was obsolete and needed
to be updated, which is how he began his journey to write “The World is Flat”.
Friedman ends his first chapter talking about the three “great eras of globalization
which have shrunk the world”. The first era he called Globalization 1.0 which takes
place from 1492-1800 which was driven by countries globalizing and shrank the
world from “large to medium”. Globalization 2.0 takes place from the 1800’s until
year 2000 and shrank the world from “medium to small” with the cause of change in
globalization being companies rather than countries like in era 1.0. Globalization 3.0
