The Unprecedented Power of Young Adults

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The Unprecedented Power of Young Adults

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.

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... ?

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.

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...

...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.

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 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.

Today's young adults do not have less power, they do not have more; they have the most. They have enough power to build a better world for themselves and for the generations to come.

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

Article Source: http://articlenexus.com

Joseph N. Abraham MD is founder of The American Public School Endowments and booksXYZ.com, the Nonprofit Bookstore Supporting 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 innovative self help book.

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