One of the few things I love about the Christmas break is that it lets me read books other than law books. This Christmas Break, I got the chance to read “The World is Flat 3.0” by Thomas Friedman, which is basically just the third edition of his popular book with the same title.
I was amazed at the clarity the book described how globalization is slowly changing the world we live in. From the day that Netscape was released up until the time Google changed the way we do search, it described how technological innovations made the world more connected or “flat” (as Friedman calls it) and what the future will probably look like in Globalization 3.0.
From the legal perspective, it is interesting to see how these innovations will affect our laws. As it is, cyberspace is already slowly changing the way we do a lot of things and it doesn’t really choose what spheres in our life to affect. Pretty soon, everything will be changed and/or transformed by cyberspace. International Law, as it is, will probably have to be more strengthened as our traditional notion of boundaries gets more and more eroded (a lot of things which was previously confined within the national level will have to be moved up to the international level by the sheer fact of it being able to affect people beyond one’s country.)
Friedman’s book is really both an explanation and a warning – an explanation behind the phenomenon that has silently changed the world we live in and a warning that if we don’t try to adapt to this phenomenon, we will eventually find ourselves on the losing side of everything.
So here’s to 2010, a year where we not only graduate and take the bar (God-willing) but also a year where we will probably find most of what we do either changed, transformed, or replaced.
- Aaron Ho (5th Entry)
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