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.

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.

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 is now the #9 website in the world. How is that possible?

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, 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.

The same thing is true of just about all of the software out there. There is free, OpenSource software that will replace almost anything you would need, from small software programs to enhance your eMail program, right up to complete packages for eZines, databases, social networking, et al.

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.

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.