The Power of Today’s Students

By Joseph N. Abraham, M.D. in Software on March 10th, 2008

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by Joseph N. Abraham, M.D.

Here at The University of Louisiana, an undergrad recently lamented to me about the passing of the student activism of the 60s & 70s. He noted that his generation feels as if those possibilities no longer exist.

That is ridiculous. Today’s young adults have much, much more powerful than any generation ever has.

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.

Consider that ranking; Wikipedia was competing against Google, CNN, MSN, eBay, AOL, enormous corporations with massive budgets.

Yet Wikipedia had only three people in the office, one of them half-time. And although the staff is grown, WikiPedia has had constant turnover in the office, even at CEO, it faces chronic funding challenges, works with employee shortages and other internal problems, all while managing a volunteer force measured in the millions. And the result of all those problems?

Wikipedia has passed the 10 websites ahead of it, to sit at #9 in the world. How?

It’s not hard to figure out… because Wikipedia is simply the most obvious example of a world-wide movement. Digg, IMDB, Blogger, Geocities, Craig’s List, Youtube, Photobucket, Friendster, and thousands of others have become household names. The free, OpenSource software, and the many platforms that are out there: message boards, social bookmarking, RSS, ListServes, social networking, blogs, eZines, podcasts, IM, mobile phones, digital cameras, tiny video cameras; make it clear that students and young adults have created many billionaires all over the planet.

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?

It is said that you can’t fight City Hall. That’s simply untrue. It is actually quite easy to fight City Hall, if you know what steps to take. It’s the media you can’t fight. The media controls the message, so they are unbeatable…

…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 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 engaging self help book.