ABSTRACT
When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published The World is Flat, arguing that the increasingly technologically connected world was leading to unprecedented opportunities for historically poor countries and undermining historical hierarchies of economic wealth and opportunity concentrated in the United States (US) and Europe, it sparked a heated debate (Friedman 2005). Critics argued that Friedman was exaggerating the changes underway and neglecting new processes that are restructuring global hierarchies but not reducing them (Christopherson et al. 2008), while others pointed out that work and employment are in fact increasingly concentrating in cities around the globe, not becoming more decentralized (Florida et al. 2008). But by 2013, Friedman was making the argument even more forcefully, saying that we've moved from a connected world to a hyper-connected world. A host of increasingly ubiquitous technological developments — Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high speed broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cell phones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone Apps — that didn't exist when he wrote The World is Flat, he argued, had enabled a whole new ‘global education, commercial, communication, and innovation platform’ (note the flat analogy again!) that is empowering individuals across the globe in whole new ways (Friedman 2013). Yet does Friedman's vision of a hyper-connected flat world economy accurately reflect the conditions in parts of the world where large portions of the population lack electricity or the basic necessities of life, much less iPhones, iPads or one of those ‘ubiquitous’ wireless and web-enabled cellphones?
