By Brian Anthony Hernandez2013-05-05 19:55:42 UTC"When I was your age we didn't have the Internet in our pants," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo joked, flaunting his phone, at his University of Michigan commencement speech. "We didn't even have the Internet not in our pants — that's how bad it was."
That was among Costolo's lines that incited UM's 2013 graduating class to break out in laughter Saturday at Michigan Stadium. Costolo, a graduate of UM who pursued comedy after earning his bachelor's degree for computer science in 1985, started his speech by tweeting a photo of the crowd and ended it saying, "hashtag go blue!"
Commencement @umich My view twitter.com/dickc/status/3…
— dick costolo (@dickc) May 4, 2013
Apart from the jokes and anticipated words of encouragement, Costolo mentioned Twitter's impact on the world, citing several momentous occasions for the social networking service that launched in 2006.
Costolo said he and early players at Twitter — such as co-founder Jack Dorsey — never planned on Barack Obama using Twitter to declare victory during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, or that Twitter would be a "great alternative communication platform if the mobile networks in Japan were spotty" after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Nor did they foresee Twitter being a tool to organize protests in Middle East countries amid the Arab Spring.
"Here's the amazing thing about what I've observed when I've witness all those things," Costolo said. "Not only can you not plan the impact you're going to have, you often won't recognize it even while you're having it."
Costolo is the latest in a line of tech luminaries to give commencement speeches, with some of the notable examples including Apple's Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005, Google's Larry Page at the University of Michigan in 2009 and Foursquare's Dennis Crowley at the Syracuse School of Information Studies in 2011.
BONUS: 10 Inspiring Celebrity Commencement Speeches on YouTube
Image via Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
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