Published: February 2, 2011

A month after the class of 2011 began their freshman year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled us Generation Q- the quiet generation. Although the title hasn’t quite stuck, the sentiment has- today’s 20-somethings have been criticized from all ends of the political spectrum for our passive idealism, our lack of radicalism =, our impulses to take to the Internet rather than to the streets when we see injustice.

But in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Jordan, young people have transformed the Internet from a chaotic collection of soapboxes to a veritable means of dissent and defiance. Social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been among the primary purveyors of firsthand accounts of the uprisings in recent weeks, and the authoritarian governments have taken notice: in Tunisia, the now-ousted government blocked social networking sites and collected political activists’ login information; more recently, the Egyptian government cut the country off from the Internet completely. Thanks to these resourceful protesters, the Internet can no longer be relegated to a position of passivity—it is clear that demonstrating online can be just as powerful as demonstrating on the streets, especially in these recent protests where we’ve seen both.

And because of this new, global protest, the revolution doesn’t stop at any country’s borders. With constant access to Al Jazeera live streams and footage straight from the protesters’ phones, young people all over the world have taken up the protests’ causes.

We see this at Fordham, too. On Jan. 30, a group of students gathered to show their support for the Egyptian people at the demonstration in front of the U.N., and ever since the uprisings began, students’ newsfeeds have been overflowing with links to new information, symbolic profile pictures and statuses about solidarity.  We can see this revolution without having to rely on the middle man of mainstream media. We are connected to it directly through our networks of friendships. This generation’s instinct to share their lives with the Internet has brought faraway struggles for freedom to the streets of New York, America, and the rest of the world.

That’s not to say that physical acts of political demonstration are obsolete, or that online activist communities can replace the power of real-life gatherings. But just as these demonstrations would not have had the same success without crowds of people making their presence and demands known, they would not have achieved the same level of international support without Facebook and YouTube. Some of us have personal connections to the uprisings like the students in Christina Frasca’s article, “Tunsia From Students’ Perspectives” on page one, but even more of us have developed shared interests and passions with the protesters since we’ve seen their humanity through the lens of the social networks we use everyday. Perhaps it is true that today’s 20-somethings are inextricably integrated into the culture of cyberspace, but that doesn’t mean we’re quiet. When we see our generation standing up for themselves abroad, we stand up with them, whether it is by taking to the streets, taking to our newsfeeds, taking to our college newspapers, or some combination of the above. We grew up in this culture of online expression and we’re not ready to write it off—we have seen the power of shared information, and so have those who’ve tried to stifle it. (Isn’t that right, Hosni Mubarak?) Gone are the days of revolutions that can be contained to a block, city or nation; it is all of our job to make sure they don’t come back.