Graduation in the Digital Age

Published: Sun May 21, 2006

This weekend I gave the baccalaureate speech at a high school in Atlanta. My credentials? I’m the author of The Parents’ Guide to College Life. I decided that, in addition waxing poetic about “letting go” and offering the usual platitudes and ruminations on life, I’d address what being digital means for today’s students.

I’ll skip the preamble and the tearjerker finish, but here are the rules I hammered out for those graduating into life as full-fledged citizens of the digital world.

If you’re passionate about something, let people know. Blog it. Podcast it. Write an op-ed. Post a web page. Technology gives us tools to let people look into our souls before they ever meet us. Once the words are put in motion, your career will be, too.

The flip side of that message? Be the person you want to be online. Don’t be a jerk. MySpace pages have resulted in lost jobs and opportunities for many. Emailing is an art—getting it wrong can cause people great pain. The only thing instant about instant messaging is the way it goes out. Once it’s out there, it lives on, gets saved, edited, and passed along, so watch what you say. It’s a reflection of you and it will be used to judge you.

Finally, your problem isn’t going to be a lack of tools or resources. Nope. You’re going to have an excess of riches in the tools department. You’re going to have a different problem. You are going to have to learn to use these tools and make sure that they’re not using you.

What does it mean to be used by your tool? You sit down at your computer to write a paper, the evening disappears, and all you’ve done was surf the web. You’ve just frittered away a perfectly good evening letting the Internet use you instead of vice versa.

Or maybe you have the coolest Facebook page in town, but your history paper—well, there wasn’t one original thought. You were so busy cutting and pasting you plumb forgot to think. When I went to school, doing research was hard, so we spent lots of time thinking about ways to avoid it, often by being wildly creative. You’ve got the opposite problem; doing the research is easy. So now try to be creative. It’s hard.

I’m sure you are all really smart people. But you’re going to need a different kind of smarts. Not the smarts that can rattle off the 50 capitals of the U.S. or draw a timeline of the World Wars. It’s the smarts to know that you’ve taken a bad turn on the information highway and you’re not getting any closer to your destination. It’s the smarts to know that sometimes you can’t multitask in 16 different windows and still create anything reasonable. It’s the smarts to know when to pick up the phone and have a conversation instead of firing off half-baked IMs. And it’s the smarts to know whether someone is what and who they say they are, whether a URL is true, and whether you’re falling for the next scam or not.