Facebook Life In A Google World

This April, Preston Swincher became the first Texas Christian University student ever to give the keynote address at the Honors Convocation. I recently read a transcript of his speech, “Facebook Life in a Google World (Or, ‘How the Internet crashed my party’)”, in TCU’s alumni magazine and was quite impressed.

Swincher makes some insightful observations about his generation. For instance, he sees the explosive popularity of social networking as a reaction to over-protective parents. “It is our way of reaching out, of creating our self-image by sharing ourselves with a world that we have been meticulously sheltered from,” he says.

He also makes some fascinating forecasts for the future:

“We are in the midst of a paradigm shift. Consider this: I’ve had three different physical addresses over the past four years. But I’ll tell you what hasn’t changed: my cell phone number and my Facebook page. In the quantum age, we have shirked the Newtonian notion of location in an absolute framework of time and space. We no longer seek to find each other based on where we stay, we seek each other where we will be, and move in relationship to each other.

I won’t write you a letter or come a-callin’. I’ll send text to the palm of your hand, place my voice in your ear, because seeing and hearing you will be as easy as saying, “I miss you.”

When all that stands between us is a few words, we’ll be as close as the vibrating air permits us to be, and suddenly the technology will connect us so seamlessly that it will disappear. When we are linked closely enough, technology will cease to be a means of communication clouded with barriers, but will instead be a pure conduit for ideas that is just as authentic and effective as talking to someone face-to-face.”

And although his ideas are a bit humanistic, I appreciate his idealism about how the shrinking of our world through technology will serve to facilitate solutions to the world’s problems:

“The Internet generation is going to put Schrödinger’s cat into Pandora’s box, shake him up until he’s good and mad and set him loose; let human curiosity on the wide Web fuel human outrage in the wider world. Then we will see change.

The human heart may not hear statistics, but it does hear voices. It sees faces. And we will put a human face and a human solution on every problem when our neighbors are not defined by geographic location or color of skin or by religion or creed, but by common interest and common humanity. The Internet is drawing tight the wire that connects us all, and when we are all shoulder to shoulder, we will not be able to ignore the problems of humanity.”

I encourage anyone who works with young people to read his entire speech. As Swincher points out, most of us who grew up in the analog age are usually scrambling to catch up with this generation, who are already at work changing the world. Swincher’s speech gives an insightful, as well as humorous, peek into the mind of Gen Y.

And I don’t know if Swincher already has post-graduate plans, but to anyone who has the ability to hire I say, “Give this guy a job!”