梅琳达.盖茨在杜克大学的毕业典礼演讲：人际关系是一切
梅琳达.盖茨在杜克大学的.2013毕业典礼演讲：人际关系是一切
President Brodhead, Trustees, members of the Duke University Community, thank you for inviting me to come back to my alma mater for this important occasion. I am grateful for the honorary degree, and moved by the opportunity to address the graduating seniors.
To the Class of 2013: Let me start by saying congratulations ...
... and by reminding you to thank your mothers and wish them a happy Mothers' Day ...
... and by admitting that I'm still bitter about the Louisville game.
I was a student here in 1986 when Coach K took the team to the finals for the first time. We lost to Louisville then, too, so you and I share that particular agony.
However, you had the good fortune to be here on campus when Duke won its fourth national championship.
I never got to see us cut down the nets, but I did see us beat UNC, in Chapel Hill, when Michael Jordan was the star of the team.
The fact that Michael Jordan recently turned 50 years old tells you how long it's been since I was a student.
No matter how much time passes, though, I always feel connected to Duke. I love visiting my favorite landmarks, especially the Duke Gardens, where I used to go when I was stressed out before exams and needed to clear my head. I went yesterday, because I wanted to make sure I was centered before giving this speech.
There's also my feeling of deep connection to the community my classmates created during our four years, and to the lifelong friends I made here -- in short, to the people. I doubt there is a word that captures the combination of experiences and places and people that we summarize under the label "Duke." The best one I can think of is "connected." And this is a word I'd like to talk about for a few minutes on your Commencement Day.
In August, 1982, I left my home in Dallas, Texas, to come here to Durham. To mark this rite of passage, my parents gave me a terrific present: the cutting-edge Olympus B12 portable typewriter, with a carrying case included. One of its best features was how light it was: Amazingly, the whole bundle weighed just 12 pounds!
It was during my time at Duke that the personal computer displaced the typewriter as the technology of choice on campus. Those of us in the computer science department actually resented the change. There were so few computers available, and all of a sudden the humanities majors were hogging our machines to write their papers.
We had to do our programming in the middle of the night, usually in the creepy basement of the old biological science building. We'd set up contests -- who programmed the fastest or made the fewest mistakes -- kind of like a prehistoric hack-a-thon. The punishment for the losers was a trip to the biology lab at the end of the hall, where they had to touch the scariest mutant frog specimens.
CONNECTION, AN INTRODUCTION
The personal computer -- and later, after I'd graduated and taken a job at Microsoft, the Internet -- started a communications revolution. My kids are a few years younger than you, but raising them has proved to me that the way you communicate is the single biggest difference between you now and me a generation ago.
One popular way of describing this aspect of your lives is to say that you're "connected." Some pundits have even started to refer to you as Generation C. One recent report overdid the c-thing by saying you are "connected, communicating, content-centric, community-oriented, always clicking." It went on to say that, for these reasons alone, you will "transform the world as we know it."
Of course, all the hype about how connected you are has contributed to a counter-narrative -- that, in fact, your generation is increasingly disconnected from the things that matter. The arguments go something like this: Instead of spending time with friends, you spend it alone, collecting friend requests. Rather than savoring your food, you take pictures of it and post them on Facebook.
I want to encourage you to reject the cynics who say technology is flattening your experience of the world. Please don't let anyone make you believe you are somehow shallow because you like to update your status on a regular basis.
The people who say technology has disconnected you from others are wrong. So are the people who say technology automatically connects you to others. Technology is just a tool. It's a powerful tool, but it's just a tool. Deep human connection is very different. It's not a tool. It's not a means to an end. It is the end -- the purpose and the result of a meaningful life -- and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.
In his famous speech "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood."
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