The Most Powerful Generation | Software

By JosephN.Abraham,M.D.
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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.

It is preposterous. The students of today have at their command vastly more power than any group of students in the history of humanity.

Wikipedia is an important model to look at. Two years ago, our nonprofit was talking with the Wikipedia staff about a possible cooperative project. When we first began working with them, of all the websites in the world, they were ranked #19.

How many corporations spend millions of dollars are year, and don't even approach that ranking? Wikipedia was moving up into the ranks of the wealthiest websites in the world, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Hotmail, Amazon, et al.

And at the time? Wikipedia had only 2.5 people working in their office. Even more impressive: since then, the WikiMedia Foundation that oversees Wikipedia has gone through several CEOs, it faces constant funding, staffing and other internal challenges, it works with a group of volunteers who also elect much of the WikiMedia Foundation Board, meaning the volunteers are both managers and managees... and after all those problems?

Wikipedia is now the #9 website in the world. How is that possible?

You can figure it out for yourself, because the same thing is happening all over the Internet. Just go anywhere on-line: 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...

...unless you are also media. Then you can take them on.

And today, students are the media. And because of it, the whole concept of medium/media has changed. Previously, when we said "media" we actually meant both the medium and the content. But look at all the Internet & telecommunications successes noted above. More and more, the corporations control only the medium itself. The content is produced by the public... which for the most part means, the students.

Which leaves us to ask, what do we need the corporations for? There are any number of cheap or free platforms that allow us to control our own message. If we don't want to buy software blogging, the OpenSource movement will supply us with several options. And if we don't want to pay the minimal costs for hosting, then there are thousands of websites that will give us a free blog, where we can control the message.

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, on-line retail, all of it.

The take-home point is, today the media is becoming only the medium, and less and less the content. Increasingly, the most influential websites are the ones that are user-generated. And most of those user-generators are teenagers and young adults.

That's how much power students have. The power to change the world.

So young adults today, rather than despair of impotence, only need to accept their power, and begin designing a different, better future.

About the Author

Joseph N. Abraham MD is president and founder of The Acadiana Educational Endowment and booksXYZ.com, the Nonprofit Bookstore Supporting 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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