In-forming

Thomas Friedman wrote a book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. This book is about “ten flatteners,” that analyzes globalization. The ten flatteners are: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Netscape, Workflow Software, Uploading, Outsourcing, Offshoring, Supply-chaining, Insourcing, In-forming, and “The Steroids.” I believe the most significant flattener is In-forming.
In-forming is people’s ability to find information so easily online. For example: Google and Wikipedia. Friedman wrote “Never before in the history of the planet have so many people- on their own- had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people.” Now people can just go on their computers every time they have a question about anything, and they will be able to get the answer within minutes. Google, for example, had 150 million searches per day three years ago, now it has roughly one billion searches per day. That is a huge jump for just three years. Technology is moving forward at a very fast pace, who knows where we will be in the next ten years.

This advancement not only has an impact on people’s personal lives, but also their careers. For example, before computers people relied on books for their knowledge. Picking up a book, looking through it, and finding the information you need, is a lengthy process. Now when people have a question, they go to a search engine and it takes seconds to get a complete answer to their questions. This makes working an easier task than before. People can now work quicker and more efficient with the answers to basically all their questions available to them within a few clicks on a mouse.