So Much Fun. So irrelevant,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/friedman-so-much-fun-so-irrelevant.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman

Thomas Friedman is very adamant that the U.S. keeps up with improving technology and innovations so that Americans can create new jobs to ensure that there remains a strong middle class. He emphasizes the vital importance of education, and the point he makes in this article is that American citizens should support candidates who promote the focusing of resources into combining "a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth" to keep up with globalization and create more middle class jobs. Friedman's criticism of the republican party candidates is clear from the title of his article. He implies that the candidates were amusing, but they made fools of themselves and cannot be taken seriously. At the beginning of his article, Friedman questions sarcastically, "What if the 2012 campaign were actually about the world in which we’re living and how we adapt to it?" implying that the candidates are avoiding or unaware of the real issues at hand. His purpose is to depict the candidates who don't agree with him as shallow and unfit to lead the U.S. in the globalizing world. After criticizing the candidates for not addressing the important issues he addresses them himself, which makes up most of the article. His purpose in beginning the article as a criticism of the Republican candidates is to attract people's interest so that they'll read and be persuaded by his ideas. Because the Iowa caucus was such a big event in the news, people would probably be more likely to read his article, which is actually about globalization and information technology, if it looked like it was about the Republican candidates. By comparing the importance of bandwidth and human intellectual capital now to that of water and raw materials in the 1800s and transportation and electricity in the 1900s, Friedman clarifies his vision of the importance of bandwidth (which I didn't realize could be important) and intellectual capital in maintaining a healthy middle class with new jobs that can compete with countries like South Korea. He moves on to support his claim with evidence, like "two billion people now on the Internet" and"35 zettabytes in 2020," showing the huge potential market, audience, and resource that the internet could be if Americans took full advantage of it and put resources into developing it. The simple statement "a zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeros," contrasts with the unimaginably huge number and further emphasizes the scale on which Friedman's suggestion operates. After this impressive data, Friedman states one of his main points: "the more talented human capital, bandwidth and computing power you apply to that data, the more innovation you’ll get." His purpose in putting this idea after the idea, not putting it up front and then supporting it, is to move from the topics that should be the focus of 2012 campaigns to why those topics are important to the U.S. and the world, and finally to connect them to one of the themes of all of his writing: innovation to stay competitive in the globalizing world. Friedman then explains how the current policy of the U.S. is different from the policy he is suggesting and why he's right. By comparing the U.S. with South Korea, Friedman gives a concrete example of how much the U.S. is falling behind. His intention is to shock and appeal to the American competitive spirit, which hates to be less than the best. Leaving readers with this dissatisfaction, Friedman returns to the GOP candidates with the question “How do you think smart cities can become the job engines of the future, and what is your plan to ensure that America has a strategic bandwidth advantage?” This makes reads not only dissatisfied with the U.S.'s current policy, but also the focuses of the 2012 campaigns of the candidates. His purpose in making readers dissatisfied is to encourage them to promote a movement toward higher bandwidths and jobs focused on intellectual capital, moving toward his worldview of a society driven by innovation.