Thomas Friedman, in his New York Times bestseller book “The World Is Flat“ explained how each year the world gets closer and closer together due to technology, transportation, and communication. He showed how our currency is interconnected and our economies rely on one another. He described the flow of trade, and he borrowed the phrase “the world is flat” to describe this.
Now then, from a philosophical standpoint let us look at this concept of the world being flat. As the world gets closer and closer we shouldn’t consider this as the world being flat, but rather as being folded where the spaces between us are closer and closer together, similar to the concept that Einstein had of folding space-time to travel from one side of the universe to the other without actually going very far.
For instance there are two flights a day from New York to Vietnam, an economically viable emerging nation. If you need something from that market you can have it in one day or you can travel there in one day. It’s just a matter of a few hours. It’s as if someone took a globe that was a beach ball and deflated it and then folded it so that New York was right up against the country of Vietnam.
So, whereas the world gets closer and closer together, it’s not getting flatter, it just has more folds between locations. You see our world is no longer separated by huge oceans those barriers have now been broken.
You can e-mail someone all the way around the world and send a report as an attachment in an e-mail, the person receiving the e-mail will receive it within seconds. So, Thomas Friedman picked a very good title for his book, but I’m here to warn you that the world is not flat, not anymore the world today is the folded. So please think on that.
