The world is flat

I am still wondering why Friedman called the world “Flat"?. He should have called it “The world is Dot” or “the world is a very small dot” or something like that:). Jokes apart, as usual with anything in this world, there are good side and bad side to any progress we make. What more could be a visible sign of the flat world than the tumbling of economies across the world one after another like a pack of cards? One country’s follies or even good acts doesn’t remain its own. It has a butterfly effect and cascades down to every single individual in the world. But that is the price we pay for connecting and rather than blaming it I would say that we should embrace the good things and find ways and means to prevent us from the “side effects” of it. A classic analogy is the internet. Every time you get connected on to it, you are exposed to the world’s best brains and knowledge that you could tap into. But at the same times there are scores of those “viruses” that is itchy enough to give you a difficult time. That is part of our survival mechanism and the better we get adapted to it, the smarter we become as a species. To be honest the world was always been connected and flat. If you look at how civilizations spread and how religions and belief systems progressed, we were always connected and were flat. The only difference between now and then is the speed at which we are becoming flatter, thanks to technological innovations.