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  • Created by Unknown User (hes3), last modified on Feb 01, 2011
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Thomas L. Friedman says that technology is flattening the world. When I was in high school, my school district began a program that would give laptops to students in grades 5-12. We had a brand new high school (I was the fifth graduating class) and the foundation was budding technology. The middle school principal showed this video at a school board meeting during the transition process.

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  1. Unknown User (hes3) AUTHOR

    And here's an updated version.

  2. Paul Schacht

    I'd seen the 2.0 version a few years ago, but hadn't noticed the 4.0 update. Thanks, Hannah!

    Thoreau writes,

    ... with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. (Walden, "Economy")

    Which is another way of saying, I think, that technology makes the world flat.

    But of course, he goes on to say,

    Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and no doubt will be, "A melancholy accident."

    Which is to say, he's skeptical about the value of that flatness. How do we feel about it, I wonder?