Columnist Thomas Friedman is worried about the politics of the Internet generation. He wrote the following in the New York Times on Wednesday in an editorial entitled "Generation Q."

I just spent the past week visiting several colleges...and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed....

I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad....

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good....America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click...won’t cut it.....Virtual politics is just that — virtual.

With all due respect Mr. Friedman, it's time to give up the idea that online politics is virtual politics and has no effect on the real world. What about the millions of online dollars MoveOn raised, which played such a large role in the 2006 democratic landslide?

What about the 2002 election in South Korea, where citizens launched a huge get-out-the-vote campaign via web sites and SMS that led to the stunnning victory of black sheep progressive presidential candidate Roh Moo-Hyun?

What about the activists in Burma who have been so effective in using e-maill and digital cameras to get images of political oppression out of their country that the Burmese government shut off the Internet?

These aren't anomalies - strange cases where the Internet did make a difference in the offline world. This is the future face of global politcs. Because the online space isn't a retreat from politics, it's politics by more powerful means.

In the 1960's a student held a sign in a sea of anti-war protestors that was momentarily glimpsed in a TV news report. Today that student can start a blog which is read by thousands, use MeetUp to organize other people living nearby in the anti-war effort, use Facebook to get his friends to join an anti-war group. In the age of digital activism, the student is not a sign-waiving participant in someone else's revolutions, she is the active creator of her own revolution.

Online tools maximize the political power of whoever uses them. They don't make us less powerful, they make us more powerful. So don't cry for Generation Q, Mr. Friedman. Twenty years from now you'll be wondering what the great sixties generation could have achieved if only they had the Internet back then like we do now.