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The Power Of Today's Students
Recently, an undergraduate here at the University of Louisiana commented to me that students today look at the student activism of the 70's, and by comparison, feel as if they have no power.
Recently, an undergraduate here at the University of Louisiana commented to me that students today look at the student activism of the 70’s, and by comparison, feel as if they have no power.
That is ridiculous. Today’s young adults have much, much more powerful than any generation ever has.
Consider WikiPedia. Our organization, The American Public School Endowments, worked with them a few of years ago. At the time, they were the #19 website in the world.
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.
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 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 Caesars of Rome, the di Medicis, the Russian Tsars-- none controlled the immense power that a student holds in just one cell phone. Given these insights, what is possible? If students really have created that much wealth (and they have), and if they wield that much power (and they do), then what are the limits? What could today’s young adults accomplish with some dedicated effort? How might government, education, and poverty change if students made up their minds to change them?
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…
...except for other media. Other news outlets get to publish their story. So if you are also media, you can compete.
And in this new Internet age, “media” has taken on a whole new meaning. Before, media was a term used too loosely, as it referred to both the medium, and the message. But look above. In these fast-moving times, the most successful websites are those that are only the medium itself, leaving the message to be contributed by the people. Which means, overwhelmingly, young people.
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 much more than blogs. The OpenSource community has produced over a quarter of a million free software packages, from tiny add-ons for existing programs, to enormous packages that will replace everything on the most advanced commercial web servers, from Wikis and Blogs up to on-line magazines to virtual environments. It’s all out there.
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.