While working with students at the University of Louisiana, recently one of them spoke wistfully to me about the student protests and activism on Civil Rights, Feminism, Viet Nam and the like. He felt that his generation did have the power to change things in fundamental ways.
Let me be blunt: Today's students are the most powerful generation of young adults in the history of the world.
The group I head, booksXYZ.com and The American Public School Endowments, worked with Wikipedia some time back. When we first contacted them, they enjoyed a traffic ranking of 19.
The #19 website in the whole world-- which includes massively funded corporate websites such as Amazon, CNN, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL, to name a few.
What is hard to believe, is that only 2 and a half people were manning the Wikipedia office. Since then, Wikipedia has faced the many problems that a rapidly expanding concern faces, employee shortages & turnovers (including CEOs), underfunding, personality clashes, typical office politics, all while trying to work with millions of volunteers and users worldwide. And the effect of all these problems is...
The Wikipedia has climbed even faster and higher, and now sits at #9. So what's the explanation?
You can figure it out for yourself, because the same thing is happening all over the Internet. Just go anywhere online: eBay, Craig's List, Geocities, YouTube, Blogger, del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook, Napster, Linux, and on & on. The computer programs available free from the OpenSource community, and the new tools available- RSS, IM, blogs, message boards, ListServes, cell phones, podcasts, social networking, cell phone cameras, eMail, eZines, video streaming, social bookmarking, porable video recorders-- have allowed people, primarily young people, to create value and wealth for companies around the globe, wealth exceeding the GNP of all but the very largest countries.
The Roman Dictators, The Kings of France, the Ottoman Sultans-- their powers pale next to what a student can create with a wireless PDA in a few minutes. If, just in their leisure time, student-contributed content has built the preceding Internet empires, and if among their overlooked laptops and cell phones students carry this much potential power, what could they accomplish if they seriously thought about it? What could students do for the world, for economic reforms, for social justice, for educational movements?
Pundits often claim that City Hall can't be beaten. They're wrong. City Hall gets beaten by average citizens every day. What can't be beaten is the news media. Since they tell everyone the story, they get to tell it their way, and so they can't be beaten...
...that is, if you aren't media yourself. If you can publish your own version, you can compete with the media.
And today's media are largely young people, young adults. In fact, the term "media" doesn't mean what it once did, for exactly that reason. In the past, "media" really meant two separate things: the medium, i.e., the vehicle for delivery; and the information, the cargo the vehicle carried. But the movements we noted previously show that, although corporations still control the vehicle, the content comes from the public. And that public is largely young adults.
But the students don't need the corporations any more. There are free, freely available media that replace all of the corporate platforms. You can pay for blog software, or you can download free, OpenSource blog platforms. And if a few dollars a month to host your own blog or other software is too much, you can use Blogger or any one of the thousands of competitors to Blogger, to publish your own content, free of charge.
This is true for any application on the 'net. The OpenSource movement has free software that will replace all of the packages that we pay for, and all of the corporate websites out there, from the smallest add-ons, right up to massive programs for operating systems, Internet publishing, online retail, all of it.
Considering that, it is clear that although the medium may still be produced by corporations, the successful websites are largely those where the public generates the content. And that public, more and more, is a young public.
So today's student has unprecedented, phenomenal power... more than enough to make this planet better.
And all the students of today need to do, is to begin deciding how best to use those tools, and begin making this little planet better.
Joseph N. Abraham MD is founder of The American Public School Endowments and booksXYZ.com, the Nonprofit Bookstore sending all proceeds to Education. booksXYZ.com lists over 2,000,000
paperbacks, hardbacks, and Audio books. Dr. Abraham is also the author of Happiness: A Physician/Biologist Looks at Life, an innovative
self help book.
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