Globalization

Thomas Friedman, author of, “globalization; the super story,” erroneously implies in his essay, that with the current “integration” and “globalization” (which are terms used to classify a “new industrial revolution” driven by powerful new information and communication technologies), of today’s economy, individuals have obtained more power and influence than ever before in history. Specifically, the rise of such technologies as the Internet and email, have empowered individuals to a new level of influence by giving them the tools necessary for global broadcast. Friedman uses Jody Williams, a Nobel prize winner, as an example of this new phenomena when she used E-mail to organize five continents into signing a treaty. This idea of “super empowered individuals” falls short when actually applied to “real life” circumstances, as Barbara Ehrenriech, author of, “Nickel and Dimed,” experienced when she went undercover as a minimum wage worker for an entire year. Her first hand experience, clearly shown throughout the novel, demonstrates that for many individuals, access to the Internet, and to the “world network” is hardly a reality; and thus so is power.

In, “Globalization; the super story,” Friedman makes the point that, “the world has become an increasingly interwoven place, and today whether you are a company or a country, your threats and opportunities increasingly derive from who you are connected to(Friedman 471).” In this statement, Friedman makes the supposition that with today’s globalization, people have access to such connections, which is clearly an overstatement. In, “Nickel and Dimed,” the people working as maids are, for the most part, living off of welfare and getting paid $6.65 per hour to clean the homes of people who most likely make six figures. According to Friedman, these maids would have a connection to the hierarchy of economic power, simply by knowing the owners of the homes or hotels, yet in reality this brings them no closer to power than anyone else. In fact, the maids were rarely ever in the same house more than once, which, “is a service to its customers: there are so sticky and possibly guilt ridden relationships involved, because the customers communicate almost entirely with the office manager(Ehrenreich 475) .”

Friedman also makes the mistake of implying that everyone, through globalization, has the means by which to access the world network. For example, one of Ehrenriech’s co-workers actually owned her own home, “but she slept on the living room sofa, while her four grown children and three grandchildren fill up the bedrooms( Ehrenreich 478).” How then, would someone scrapping by like this maid, have any power or access to globalized connections? For people working minimum wage, there is no access to the Internet directly, and so Friedman’s statement that, “everyone in the world is directly or indirectly affected by the new system (integration),” is simply false. The minimum wage laborer feels no more globalized and empowered as they ever were, and