The Flattening of Prague

As Friedman notes, the "flattening" of the world began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Physically, it opened up the playing field by ending the Cold War and allowing those from the East to become players in a pre-established global marketplace-including the media. With regards to media ownership, this resulted in establishing a media by the people and for the people. Prague's Zizkov Tower, initially set up in 1989 to jam the transmissions of foreign, Western, signals, is now a tower used to broadcast reality TV shows (a Western innovation) to Czech viewers. It has also become a Westernized tourist attraction, complete with sculpted dark babies crawling up the side of the tower, designed by David Cerny (who would have surely been blacklisted had he pitched the black baby idea to officials pre-fall).

Like many of the post-Wall countries, the Czech Republic is now a country that is eager to adapt to the Western model. A member of the EU and working towards adopting the Euro as a form of currency, the Czech people-particularly the younger generations-are eager to become more integrated with Western culture. To them, Western culture symbolizes a greater amount of freedom, including freedom of expression and freedom of speech. News programs are now able to broadcast news as it happens, not as the government wishes it to be perceived. Western television shows, movies, and channels are available on satellite and cable options.

Particularly encouraged by the growing number of expatriates living in the Czech Republic-mainly Prague-Western magazines are now available on newsstands. While a lighter, fluffier form of media is now integrated within many of the serious aspects of Communist media; it is a fluff that is welcomed especially by younger people. In this aspect, some may argue that the quality of many media outlets has gone down. Reality television and women's magazines are hardly seen as the stuff of enlightened or deep-cutting journalism or entertainment. However, with this freedom also comes the freedom of television shows and newspapers that are able to discuss frankly and deeply current socio-political events that would normally be taboo to discuss in a "big brother" public. There are two sides of the Czech spectrum, both of which are served in the "flattening" of media; lowering the quality of some news sources and raising the quality of others.

On the Western home-front for these forms of media, this also began a process, as Friedman puts it, of moving from a vertical to a horizontal means of doing business. Vertically speaking, the media would originally begin with a demand that is channeled through its providers back to the consumer (a two step demand and subsequent supply). Horizontally, however, involves what has become more prevalent with media: the audience reacting to and communicating with their media and its supplier, thereby creating a cyclical process. We now live in a society where we vote for who remains on our television shows, we can even be on our television shows, and have a control via the Internet of commenting on our news stories through television, magazines, and newspapers. A large stride away from government-controlled media (a vertical process where the only participant is the media owner), flattening has revolutionized our socio-political and economic ways of life, extending into our media and its global reach.