Ini teks yang saya tulis untuk speech competition PIMNAS 2010 yang sayangnya saya belum berkesempatan menang disana. Well, saya rasa masih relevan untuk di post disini 🙂 Speech saya ini mengambil salah satu topik yang disediakan panitia: how technology impact our daily life, dan saya mengambil tema bagaimana internet merubah kehidupan kita -terutama anak muda- dalam tahun-tahun kedepan karena ada lebih banyak kesempatan yang tersedia karena “ketertautan” yang disediakan internet.

Well, lupakan urusan PIMNAS. Here’s the speech: 😉

Can You Imagine That?

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It’s an honor for me to have a very great chance to speak in front of you all, students and representatives who come here from various regions of this country.

In this opportunity, I would like to share with you about how our lives, especially the life of youth like you and I, will be changed even more significantly by internet in years to come.

Ladies and gentlemen,
In 2004, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia – the biggest online collaborative encyclopedia, said:

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

If there is one major technology which revolutionize the way we live in our current lifetime, I completely believe that it is internet.

The question is, why internet changes and will further change our life?

Most people see internet merely as an entertainment tool; stuff which is used for wasting time when they have nothing to do; like chatting through Yahoo! Messenger, tweeting in Twitter, finding old exes and friends in Facebook, reading the latest gossip on famous gossip blog, and so on and so forth.

If those things are the only things you know or imagine about the use of internet, think again. Those entertainment stuffs are only a small tip of what internet is all about. Internet is much more than that.

What internet actually does is liberating the information. It spreads the knowledge. It makes people, even ordinary people like you and I, able to disseminate almost any kind of information, wisdoms, experiences, and knowledge, to a global audience. As easy as publishing them, we are also able to access almost any kind of information which is published by everyone. Internet does the same thing like printing machine did in 1440s: it spread information, and the consequence is more and more people gain a better life because they could learn more through the information which is distributed.

The difference is, internet does it in a global scale, without geographic restriction, without time boundaries.

This ability simply makes the internet becomes the largest jungle of information ever. It contains almost all information you need. One of the impact is everything can be achieved faster, because internet helps us to know “the how” easily and in addition to help us connect with people who can give a help. With internet, career and succeess now can be achieved faster. Career which probably needs 20 or 40 years to be achieved in our parents’ era, probably can be achieved in less than 10 years.

Let me give you an example. Have you ever heard Justin Bieber? 2 years ago, he was just a 14 years-old ordinary Canadian kid who published video clip on YouTube, the biggest video sharing website. He never imagined people watched and loved his video. One day, a music producer watched his video, impressed by his performance, contacted him and ended up producing his album. 2 years later, which is right now, Bieber is a young singer with millions of fans in every corner of the world.

It just one example. If you keep searching something like “successful entrepreneur below 30 years old” on Google.com, you will find out hundreds, or even thousands, if I exaggerate, of youth who can achieve his/her succeess in a very young age.

Internet brings us into an information age, where information is accessible by everyone and everywhere. In information age, everything is changed. Older doesn’t always mean better anymore because younger people like you and i now have incredible resource we need: the information, the way to connect with the right people, publishing channel, and everything internet can provide.

Imagine that you want to start a business. Let’s say, a furniture business. The problem is, you haven’t had any idea of how to start it. With no intention of giving up, you access the internet, search the information about it, and end up in a web page which explains how to start a business or even how to start a furniture business or even a contact number of people who already run a furniture business who can provide you an information or even cooperation. Then, you decide to give it a try. “Why not?” – you think. And the rest is your history.

With internet which is a powerful tool in our hand, the questions left are will we optimize internet to achieve the purpose of our lives? Are we willing to put in effort, hard work and dedication achieve what we want? When will we start to optimize it because everything we need is available right here, right now, right in every cellphones in our pocket and every PCs in our house?

Internet is not only a tool for having fun like chatting with your friends in Facebook. It is more as an opportunity to help you direct your life, foster your creativity, and achieve your dream – faster & more affordable than ever.

Thank you.