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The Most Powerful Generation 

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.

Let me be blunt: Today's students are the most powerful generation of young adults in the history of the world.

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.

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... ?

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

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.

Caesar, the Bourbon Kings, the Czars of Russia-- none of them had the power at their fingertips that students have at this very instant. So just imagine what students could do if they put their time and talents toward creating more meaningful mass movements: social, political, economic, educational?

City Hall, it is often said, cannot be beaten. That's not true. People beat City Hall every day. The media, however, is a completely different story. They get to publish their version, so they always get they last word, meaning they always win...

...except for other media. Other news outlets get to publish their story. So if you are also media, you can compete.

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.

And the advent of cheap and free software leaves us wondering why young people need the corporations any more. OpenSource software gives everyone access to free blogging software. If that's too much trouble, there are many 'sites that will do the work and supply the platform for free. Then each of us is also media.

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.

So obviously, the media is moving toward being only that: a medium. The most successful websites are the ones where the content comes from the people, primarily young people.

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

It's that simple. All that is necessary is for students to merely recognize the truth, and pick their path.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Joseph N. Abraham MD is president 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 has written the book Happiness: A Physician/Biologist Looks at Life, an engaging self help book. You can get a unique content version of this article.

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