Tom Brokaw, NBC television journalist, recently gave the commencement speech at Stanford University‘s graduation. It’s been captured on YouTube in two parts: one and two. Brokaw would have been aware that Stanford has produced a high proportion of innovators in the digital world, including Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. He spoke to 1700 students and perhaps 16,000 family members and friends. The full text is available at Stanford News Service.

Here’s some short excerpts from Brokaw’s speech.

You have so many choices and so many opportunities. You are the generation of a breathtaking transformational technology that for all of its possibility is really hard to believe still is in its seminal stages. It is the single most important technological development of my lifetime. It is limited only by our imaginations. It is a powerful tool across the arc of possibilities. You live in a world of personal computers and search engines, e-mail and network, capacity and storage, research and retrieval, entertainment and commerce, chat rooms and websites, MySpace and Spaceport.
You’re manned with PDAs that take pictures, remember your tastes, indulge your whimsies and play your favorite tunes. You have video on demand and songs on a chip and games on a screen. You have bloggers that blabber and blogs that enlighten. You’re exposed to hi-def and lowbrow. You are the masters of a new universe whose boundaries are yet to be determined. But it’s also important to remember that it will do us little good to wire the world if we short-circuit our souls.
So, welcome to a world of perpetual contradictions, welcome to a world of unintended consequences and unexpected realities. Welcome to a world in which war is not a video game, . in which genocide and ancient hatreds are not eliminated with a delete button. You won’t find the answer to global poverty in Tools or Help. You cannot fix the environment by hitting the Insert bar. You cannot take your place in the long line of those who came before you simply by sitting in front of a screen or at a keyboard.

Brokaw’s words are a needed reminder that there is much more to life than sitting in front of a keyboard and computer screen. Mind you, the same can be said about sitting in front of television screens or cameras. This morning, on my way to the office, one of my tyres was punctured and blew out. Fortunately I was able to stop quickly, pull into a bus stop and change the tyre. The welcome addition to my day was the walk from Bridgestone Tyre centre to my office. I was able to enjoy the beautiful Brisbane day, sampling an informal game of soccer, talking to a woman looking for instructions to the hospital, and finding the back route behind the croquet club. Slowing down reminded me of the need to chill out a bit, not to stress so much. I resisted the temptation to capture a few images on the mobile phone camera. After all, I don’t need to wait until my car is incapacitated again before I walk the neighbourhood!