刘柳：厦门大学嘉庚学院选手，第17届21世纪杯全国英语演讲比赛三等奖获得者。

演讲稿：

Wake up to the real truth in the cold world

Ladies and gentleman,

It is the best of times, it is also the worst of times.

It is the age of wisdom, it is also the age of foolishness.

We have everything before technology, we lost something after technology.

The world is a village, but everyone is an island.

What happened to us? Here is a story for you.

In the past spring festival, I was enjoying the Spring Festival Gala on TV. My phone rang every 4 minutes, no calling, just greeting messages. 75 altogether, my phone said. I felt delighted about the large number. But what happened later made me extremely disappointed and incredibly sad. In my 75 texts, almost all the greetings were the same. In fact, I only got 10 different messages. The worst part was that when I was surfing on the internet, I surprisingly found many websites providing thousands of ready-made messages. Then I looked back to my texts, all of them were from those websites.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do not want to sound ungrateful, but how pathetic. These greetings are supposed to be from our soul, our hearts, not downloaded from the Internet. Realizing this, I made a change. I spent 2 hours calling my friends who were miles away from me, rather than send messages. We chatted and laughed. Hearing their voices, I felt they were around me, as if we were having a hotpot dinner together.

It also reminded me of what I did when I was a child during Spring Festival, I would pay a New Year’s visit to my grandparents, parents and other relatives and said “long life” to them. This is the key of bainian, a real and emotion-driven action. Not just me, I can for sure most of you had similar experiences. The warmth of face-to-face communication, cannot be fully expressed by a phone call or messages.

Yes, Now, ladies and gentlemen, is the time we as parents, not e-books, should tell bedtime stories to our children.

Now is the time for all of us to stop blaming technology for this cold-blooded world.

Now is the time for all of us to wake up to the possibility of using technology to serve our needs as human beings.

Yes, technology is our friend, not our enemy.

Together we will make the world a better place.