How The “Follow” Button Has Accelerated World Globalization

How The “Follow” Button Has Accelerated World Globalization

I watched a great TED Talk for Pankaj Ghemawat, the author of “World 3.0” Book, on Globalization. In his 2012 talk, Pankaj argued that the world isn’t actually as globalized and as flat as we think!

His argument is based on actual data collected from all over the world to measure things like: international phone calls as a percentage of all phone calls (2%), international “Friends” for an average Facebook users as a percentage of all friends (10%-15%), and few other factors.

His research concluded that the world is only 10%-20% globalized!

It’s amazing how much has changed in only 4 years! Now, in 2016, with Snapchat, Instagram, Medium, and of course the platform that started this movement, Twitter, all that has changed!

Unlike Facebook, an “Add-Based” network, which people use to connect with friends and family, or LinkedIn, a “Connect-Based” network, which people use to connect with co-workers and clients, the “Follow-Based” networks are used to access a new world of non-friends, a world of curiosity and adventure into strangers’ lives, strangers who you never met, and might never meet in person. Yet, you still want to see their pictures on Instagram, and watch their videos on Snapchat.

Although Facebook and LinkedIn have added the “Follow” option to their main functions later on, people will always use those old social networks for the original use cases they were built for.

I wish I have data on international followers as a percentage of all followers per average user on Instagram or Snapchat, but I would assume that the rate is much larger than Facebook’s 10%-15%.

What do you think? Is the world more flat and globalized now because of those new Follow-based social platforms?