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.

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.

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?

It's really quite simple, because it's happening everywhere. Look at Napster, Youtube, Blogger, del.icio.us, Photobucket, eBay, Myspace, Linux & the OpenSource movement, etc, etc, etc. Using freely available software and new technologies-- eMail, ListServes, message boards, social networking, social bookmarking, blogs, eZines, podcasts, live audio/video streaming, IM, RSS, cell phones, cell phone cameras, cell phone video cameras-- the public, mostly students, have created trillions of dollars in profit and other value for individuals and corporations.

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, 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.

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.