Dara Ali
April 26, 2011
"The Three Flatteners"

Thomas Friedman names ten flatteners in his book, Thw World is Flat. Here, precisely, I will be discussing three of them.

First of all, let’s have a gist about the word “flattener”. It means the reason that levels the surface of something to a leveled degree. Metaphorically, the author uses the word to disrobe the events, reasons, and incidents happened in the world that helped to have a better scale of connection and shaped transformation in the field of technology.

First, down of the Berlin Wall. In 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Cold War came to its end. After that time, immediately, people could easily reach behind the wall. More, many companies, CEOs, and prime ministers reached behind the wall and went to Russia and all the parts of Germany. It, of course, greatly helped increase of a better connection and assistance in the field of technology.

Second, the creation of the World Wide Web. There were many companies working in the field of the Internet. Netscape was one of them. That company was working in the internet field and, for the first time, created a worldwide feature that helped the internet used to connect. HTML, however, was created as an internet language that increased the number of internet users greatly.

Third, Word Flow Software is created. Computers, for the first time in their history, could communicate through a binary language which consisted of a combination of 0 and 1. It greatly helped computer machines to communicate with each another without human interference.


I do absolutely agree with Friedman to name these three elements as reasons flattening the world. For the first one is explicit of how the down of the Berlin Wall changed the world. It did not only end the Cold War, but also introduced U.S.A. as the major world power which was based on technology-heavy technology. And it helped to a better communications within the world countries globally. For the second one I can say without the World Wide Web the internet is useless. It was an internet language that amazingly changed connections in the world. For the third reason, however, creating an intertwined connection within the computers, of course, as a language between them, was astonishing because computers could communicate to each another ever since.