I suppose that people have always had endless opinions. Roman gladiators probably had many opinions about the ruling class that set them to killing each other. I’m sure those who lived next door to Attila the Hun had no shortage of opinions. I recall a visit my wife and I made to an ancient European fortified castle that had been used as a 16th century prison; the varied opinions of the prisoners had been scratched into the stone. Clearly, in the past people had plenty of opinions, but had limited ways to express them.
Today of course, people have endless opportunities to express their endless opinions. For example, it’s estimated that there are more than 50 million blogs. Now that’s a lot of opinions. In fact, never in history have so many people said so much about so little to so few. Many of these blogs are about the ways that parents suck, or what model iPod is best, or how to “hack” Web sites. Yet other blogs are about meeting friends and sharing opinions about what music, or videos or movies one likes best. Then there are the blogs about politics, ranting about how stupid people are for supporting this opinion or how smart they are for supporting that. No doubt all this blogging is letting off a lot of steam for people who might otherwise be hitting the dog or the bottle or other people. But honestly, I don’t read blogs very often. And I certainly don’t have time to read 50 million of them.
So the question arises, who is reading all this stuff? Or, put another way, is anyone reading this stuff? Statistics show that books are not getting read as much anymore; the number of bookstores in America has dropped consistently for the past 30 years. Magazine sales are dropping too, and newspapers all over the country are going out of business or getting bought out by their competitors.
Most of the mail we at home get is junk, and we throw it away without opening it. Between the envelopes from ex-presidents, aspiring presidents, senators, congressmen, every non-profit organization in the world and the dozen mail-order catalogs we get every day this time of year, our recycle container fills up so fast sometimes I can’t lower the lid before the garbage is picked up.
And e-mail… Oh Lord, I am absolutely swamped with e-mail! Solicitations to buy stock in companies I’ve never heard of, offers for low prices on printer cartridges (to print out all the e-mails and blogs, of course), renewal notices, “official”-looking e-mail from financial companies asking for my bank account information. Junk, scams, trash and spam; sounds like the name of a law firm!
Anyway, I’ve had my say. Besides, if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve answered my basic question about who it is that has time to read all these damned opinions.
