Great talk/reading (from his version 3.0 of his book coming out later this year) by Tom Friedman.

Basically, he believes flattening is intensifying everywhere he goes.

He discussed the impact that flatness is having on activism. The imaginary CEO’s encounter with “these people”, the invisible, omnipresent activists emailing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging and making their voice heard is the essence of this generation’s social activists. Resources are not a constraint to their efforts, and they have, and will continue to make, multinationals change their behavior overnight. Being an activist entrepreneur is cheaper and easier than ever before. Ultimately, he says, “if it’s not happening, it’s because you’re not doing it.”

In describing a trip to France when Friedman and his driver were both fully wired and engaged with other people, but not each other, quoting a friend, he said, “I guess the era of foreign reporters quoted Paris taxi cab drivers is over.” The disease of the Internet age is continuous partial attention, he said, we are everywhere but here.

There are social downsides of the effects of all this new connectivity. We are connected and interrupting one another as never before. A coarsening of our language and dumbing down of our discourse. We are content developers and content readers – we can all suddenly hear everything whispered about us. We are all public figures, everybody is fair game. How can we correct what’s written about us? In short, in his pithy Friedman style, he said, when will we all have dog’s hearing?

He closed by saying we are only constrained by our imagination. He is much more optimistic today than ever, we are imagining, acting, doing.

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