Numerous books and articles published in recent years argue, explicitly as well as implicitly, that the human world today is so mobile, so interconnected, and so integrative that it is, in one prominent and much-repeated assessment, “flat.” Ancient and durable obstacles are no more, interaction is global, free trade rules the globe, migration is ubiquitous,1 and the flow of ideas (and money and jobs) is so pervasive that geography, in the perspective of more than one observer, “is history.” The notion that place continues to play a key role in shaping humanity’s still-variegated mosaic is seen as obsolete, even offensive and deterministic. Choice, not constraint, is the mantra2 of the new flat-world proponents. Join the “forces of flattening” and you will enjoy the benefits. Don’t, and you will fall off the edge. The option is yours. But is it? From the vantage point of a high-floor room in the Shanghai Hyatt, the Mumbai Oberoi, or the Dubai Hilton,3 or from a business-class window seat on Singapore Airlines, the world seems flat indeed. Millions of world-flatteners move every day from hotel lobby to airport limo to first-class lounge, laptop in hand, uploading, outsourcing, offshoring as they travel, adjusting the air conditioning as they go. They are changing the world, these modern nomads, and they are, in many ways, improving it—depending of course on one’s definition of progress. But are they invariably agents of access and integration? Are they lowering the barriers to participation or raising the stakes against it? Have their influence and impact overpowered the imperatives of place, so that their very mobility symbolizes a confirmed irrelevance of location?

Not yet. The Earth, physically as well as culturally, still is very rough terrain, and in crucial ways its regional compartments continue to trap billions in circumstances that spell disadvantage. The power of place and the fate of people are linked by many strands ranging from physical area and natural environment to durable culture and local tradition. This book, therefore, views a world in which progress toward convergence is countered by stagnation, even setbacks. Various constituencies of the comparatively prosperous global core are walling off their affluent realms from intrusion by poorer globals, hardening a division between core and periphery that exacerbates contrasts and stokes conflicts. The near-global diffusion of various forms of English as a first or second language is promoting a cultural convergence, but the radicalization of religions has the opposite effect. The distribution of health and well-being shows troubling signs of inequity and reversal. Because people continue to congregate in places of high environmental risk, especially in the crowded periphery, hundreds of millions find themselves in continuing jeopardy (as the 2004 tsunami,4 in the absence of coordinated warning systems, tragically confirmed). Inevitably, places of costly historic and current conflict take their toll as the “international community” stands by without effective intervention, another form of jeopardy that afflicts the destinies of millions. And males and females in the same locales have widely varying experiences, their destinies diverging in sometimes agonizing ways. Even in the world’s cities, where the “rising tide lifts all boats” promise of globalization should be especially evident, power creates a high-relief topography of privilege and privation. Nor is the world’s divisive political stockade5 likely to be flattened anytime soon. Even as states try to join in unions and associations, their provinces and regions nurture nationalisms working the other way. The power of place still holds the vast majority of us in its thrall.

Of course, the question is not whether the world is flat. Thomas Friedman, who coined the phrase, concedes that he realizes “that the world is not flat. Don’t worry, I know . . . I have engaged in literary license in titling [my] book to draw attention . . . .” It is the process of “flattening” on which Friedman wants to focus through his provocative title, “the single most important trend in the world today,” that is at issue. And in certain respects the global playing field is leveling, but in other ways the reverse appears to be true. Notions of a flat world raise expectations of growing access and increasing opportunity that are mantras of globalization but are all too often at variance with reality. Powerful forces, natural as well as human, slow the flattening process in a contest that will determine the future of the planet.

In the passage, the author makes which of the following assumptions about his audience?
A. They are familiar with mainstream rhetoric about globalization.
B. They are concerned about the loss of cultural diversity.
C. They support taking collective action to address local problems.
D. They benefit from the process of global convergence.
E. They oppose ceding local control to global organizations.