New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, answered questions from Elon students Monday, Sept. 29, before offering the Baird Pulitzer Prize Lecture at 6 p.m. in the Koury Center. Details...
Friedman focused on globalization during the hour-long question-and-answer session in Whitley Auditorium, telling the audience of 250 that this era of expansion is based on technology.
“The first era of globalization was based on falling transportation costs,” Friedman said of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. “This era is based on something different. Falling telecommunications costs have made it possible to grow like never before.”
While technology has shrunk the world, Friedman says we must be careful how we use it.
“Technology has made it so much easier for us to talk to each other, but the framework to understanding each other can’t be downloaded. It has to be uploaded, through things like study abroad and internships,” Friedman said. “One of the paradoxes of the internet is that rather than promoting understanding, it’s just raising the world’s blood pressure.”
Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the Times since 1995, said the United States’ exponential growth since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as both a military and economic superpower, made its influence felt in a way never seen before.
“We have grown so rapidly that we’ve begun to touch people’s lives, culturally and economically, more than their own governments,” Friedman said. As a result, America was seen differently by the rest of the world after the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.
“After 9/11, we went from being Puff the Magic Dragon to Godzilla,” Friedman said, adding that the UN debate over Iraq was a battle over which nations would have a vote in the future of people worldwide, rather than just the US invasion.
Asked if he aspires to political office, Friedman says he loves being a journalist and columnist and the freedom of speech that comes with it.
“When you’ve been able to say it exactly the way you want to say it, in 750 newspapers around the world, to have to say ‘no comment’ or ‘let me look into that,’…I can’t imagine that.”