Recently a UL undergrad 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.

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

Look at WikiPedia. Our organization worked with them a few of years ago. At the time, they were the #19 website in the world. In the whole world-- which includes massively funded corporate websites such as Amazon, CNN, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL, to name a few.

And Wikipedia had only 2.5 people working in their office. Even more impressive: since then, they have gone through 3 or 4 CEOs, they have constant internal, managerial and organizational problems... and after all those problems?

Now they are the #9 website in the world.

Look at Napster, Youtube, Blogger, del.icio.us, Photobucket, eBay, Myspace, Linux & OpenSource, 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 for individuals and corporations.

Alexander, 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 decided to create other mass movements: social, political, economic, educational? And if it is possible to create such movements, is there any reason that UL students couldn't become leaders and innovators in the field?

It is said that you can't fight City Hall. That's simply untrue. It is actually quite easy to fight City Hall, if you know what steps to take. It's the media you can't fight. The media controls the message, so they are unbeatable...

...unless you are also media. Then you can take them on.

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 those Internet/telecommunications movements noted above. More and more, the corporations control only the medium itself. The content is the public's... which for the most part means the students'.

So 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 platforms. In fact, there is free, OpenSource software that will replace almost any commercial software on the market. And if the few dollars a month to host your own blog or other software is too much, you can use Blogger (or you can use ultoday.com, we're looking for bloggers), or any number of other platforms that will provide you the tools you need to publish your own content, free of charge.

The take-home point is, today the media is only the medium... it's less and less the content. More and more, the most influential websites are the ones that are user-generated. And most of those users are teenagers/young adults.

That's how much power students have.

And here at UL, our students have perhaps more power than students anywhere in the world, for one reason: 100 mb/sec.

The LUS Fiber To The Home initiative will create, here in little ol' Lafayette, the fastest community intranet in the world. Peer-to-peer transmission rates on LUS will be 100 mb/sec.

Let me put that in perspective for those of you who don't do a lot of technology. For our websites, booksXYZ.com, CajunFun.com and ultoday.com, the AEE buys big, commercial pipes for Internet delivery.

And all we get is 4 mb/sec. But that bandwidth will handle our growth for quite a while to come.

So what can be done with 100 mb/sec??? No one knows. But if students decide to start a UL OpenMedia Activists group, then use the LUS intranet to build it out, and then use the two of them to recruit students to UL...

...the University will rapidly grow in enrollment; the added students would tend to be supersmart kids, i.e. techies and socially-motivated individuals; UL would become a leader in these new fields of OpenSource software and tele-activism; and no other school would begin approach us for some years to come.

And the world would change because of it.