Dear reader, dear reader, think about who you have communicated with in the last twenty-four hours and through what means. write it down Try to remember what the answer to this very question would have been like ten years ago. And try to compare how our relationships have evolved over this time. When is the last time you talked on the phone with your partner, friends, children, even co-workers? Are you one of those people who asks, through an application, if they can do so before calling so as not to interrupt? In how many social networks do you actively move? And an increasingly common question, if you are single -or maybe not-: do you regularly use dating websites to establish new contacts? I ask the world’s foremost expert on the use of networks and their economic and social effects, Stanford University professor, matthew jackson, if you have begun to study the networks that originate all this Internet dating market. He answers me, with a Californian smile: “not yet”. To begin with, he says, he is immersed in a macro-study on the use of networks by 80 million Americans and how it can affect human decisions and behavior. Let science order what the Spanish proverb already intuits: “Tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
jackson, author of books such as ‘The human network’, had just been one of the fourteen winners of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge awards, given in Bilbao last Thursday. He concluded his speech by saying, “Technology is allowing people to be more connected than ever, but at the same time, despite these connections, our world is becoming more polarized.” While there are people and countries that try to build more meeting bridges, others generate obstacles to destroy them. The development of these networks will mark a large part of the social, family, business, commercial and political structures.
Network studies are in fashion. Another Stanford professor, Mark Grano Vetter, won the Humanities and Social Sciences award for his pioneering studies on the weak and superficial ties, as he defined them, between people can be decisive. For example, to get a job. Regarding dating, this researcher explains: “The cases of intimate friendships that emerge ‘on line’ before they do in real life are really surprising. We still don’t know how this is going to change the world, it is a subject to which we attention”. One day, the studies of these experts will be worthy of the Nobel Prize.
Since they were instituted in 2009, the BBVA Foundation awards, chaired by Charles Torres, have established themselves among the most prestigious in the world. Observing, at 85 years of age, the great composer of the last 50 years, Philip Glassreceiving your award is a privilege.
From the beginning, the foundation emphasized and opted for research on climate change and warned of the dangers that threaten biodiversity. On that afternoon in Bilbao, where the thermometers reached 44 degrees on the Gran Vía, the prize awarded to paleoclimatologists from the University of Ohio was more than symbolic. Ellen Mosley–Thompson Y lonnie thomson, who have spent a lifetime investigating how climate is affecting glaciers. And the news, unfortunately, is not positive. “It may be too late to save the planet, but we can still slow down warming,” said Professor Thompson. In contrast to the climate challenge, the words of one of the three biology and biomedicine award winners, Professor Drew Weissmann: “I am happy to know that our research (on the RNA molecule, the key to creating the vaccine against covid-19) has served to save the world.”
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Fighting from thought, research and wisdom is essential to try to overcome short-termism and the excesses of contemporary life to which we are subject. A “movement”, as the president of the CSIC defined in her intervention, Rosa Menendez, which can confuse us and make us lose perspective. On many occasions, noise prevents those people who deserve much more attention from being highlighted. That these prizes are awarded by a Spanish institution is worthy of reflection in a country where enormous amounts of money are earned by characters of unprecedented frivolity, created for mass consumption. Meanwhile, in Spain, the best professors at our universities must emigrate to other countries -especially the United States- if they want to progress professionally and economically.
These international awards, as well as those awarded by the Princess of Asturias Foundation are an example. They must serve to generate complicity, consensus and networks! in favor of radical support for research in Spain and professional merit in key activities for the future of our planet and humanity.