Students as Smart Mobs

Abstract

In a February New York Times editorial, Thomas Friedman wrote about two college students who embarked on a 2,100-mile climate solutions road tour from Chennai to New Delhi to train Indian students to start their own climate action programs. The students traveled in modified plug-in cars retrofitted with a solar roof to extend the travel miles on a six-hour charge and made stops in over 30 cities and villages. They filmed more than 20 videos of India's top home-grown energy solutions along the way and uploaded those to YouTube so that more individuals could learn about climate reduction ideas. The YouTube videos generated more interest, and more individuals hopped on the caravan so they could highlight their innovations. Friedman used this inspiring story to show that today's youth aren't going to wait for business or government to solve problems. Instead, they will take collective action to find new solutions. a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it's refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation, he wrote. This is more than an experience unique to two upwardly mobile college students. Look around and see how many individuals under age 30 are creating new social programs or becoming business entrepreneurs. Those two students are among the many makers, creators, and innovators who recognize the significance of collaboration for citizenship and economic leadership. Growing up Digital Read Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital or Wikinomics, and you'll quickly understand that Friedman's optimism isn't dependent on those two students. Tapscott surveyed 11,000 young people and found that today's youth yearn for and demand participation, deep customization of products and services, collaboration, and an opportunity to contribute to solving local and global problems. As a result, we have a generation that doesn't want to be and won't be passive recipients of products, problems, and services. Instead, today's youth want to be active in co-creating value with their favorite companies, organizations, or peers to change the world, to support their local communities, to learn, to fulfill personal needs, or just to have fun. Maybe you're wondering what's innovative about this. After all, one could argue that individuals have always been willing to come together to affect change. And that's true. But until recently, individuals didn't have the opportunity to link up through loose networks of peers to create and produce goods and services collaboratively in a very tangible and ongoing way. The simplest, most accessible, and common tools--such as e-mail, mobile phones, and web sites, including social networking sites--enable individuals, and particularly youth who have grown up in the digital age, to have unprecedented opportunities for mass collaboration and action. Last year, these tools helped President Barack Obama win the election. Before this, youth in South Korea, Spain, and the Philippines tipped elections using their cell phones and PDAs to get friends to vote. These are examples of what Howard Rheingold (2002) calls a smart mob--a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. >> Want to listen to Don Tapscott talk about what he's learned about the Net Generation? …