Two chapters into Friedman’s new book
"the world is flat: a brief history of the 21st century", there is one thing that I am sure about. This book will not be fully published in China, never, the abridged version, maybe, but never the full version.
The author draw the conclusion that the world is flat during his visit to someplace called Bangalore in Indian. He excitingly described his observation that Indians happily work for American or European call centers imitating various American or British accent to help Americans and Britons to reboots their computers or to find their lost luggage from half world around.
The world is flat to Friedman according to ten developments: (1) the collapse of the Berlin wall, signifying the victory of capitalism and end of the Cold War-era division of the world, yielding a single global market; (2) the invention of the Netscape Internet browser, which has dramatically increased the universal sharing of information; (3) the emergence of “work flow” software, such as Outlook, Ebay, and Paypal, which enables people to collaborate on projects and conduct commerce from remote locations; (4) open-source programming, which has forged a culture of information-sharing that has dramatically reduced costs; (5) outsourcing of off-site services, such as answering phone calls, around the globe, especially to India; (forgive me, I just come to the first 5 points).
Three lines into the argument on collapse of the Berlin wall is important to flatten the world, I had the sense that the book will not be introduced into China. When I come to the following page, I pictured the author as arrogant, American-centric, no understanding of the world besides the first world, although he claimed in his books that he conducts researches on globalization and travels a lot around the East.
He is a promoter of American value and American way of free market regardless of different situations of the third world countries such as Indian, China. In his mind American style of free market is the only way towards prosperity. The former Soviet Union, East European countries, Indian, Japan, and China all should be integrated into the single global free market machine.
In the sense of sociology and communication studies, Orientalizm reflects Western's dream of the oriental, Western's imagination about the East, Friedman's new book carried on the imagination. He pictured that young Indians are happy and eager to work for American call centers and to imitate American accents. He said if a small trouble of imitating American accent can help them come to the middle class, why not? By saying so, he stood at the threshold of a sensitive topic of national identity under globalization but he let it untouched. Why?
Friedman cared nothing about the natives in the Eastern world, he denied a chance for the east natives to speak for themselves. Do the young Indians, who are well educated, really happy about receiving calls transmitted from far away selling a credit card which he can never afford with middle-west American accent? These smart and educated young men could be actually very unhappy about not able to find a equally decent and paid job as their Western counterparts, they could be very unhappy receiving calls to help Western people to solve stupid computer problems. Their call center jobs are nothing but their ways of making a living. But Mr. Friedman concluded that they are happy about the job. Mr. Friedman put those native Indians into a position which inferior to the West.
The world is not going to be flat only because of digitalization, computer network and grass-root content generation. The world described in his first several chapters to me is more like a world which organized in a circle with American, maybe other first world countries, in the center served by the second and third world countries. This is a sun-earth and earth-moon situation.
Yes, Friedman is right in the facts that call centers is moving to India, factories is moving to China, he is right on the facts of out sourcing and home sourcing. He knows those changes were merely big corporations looking for ways to reduce cost. He knows change is painful especially for those who were taken by surprise. But he has limited solutions to the pain of change. On the crucial moral issue of whether globalization takes unfair advantage of poor countries — Friedman merely suggests that we “sort that out.”
We sort that out?
