Opinions: Everyone's got one

Overheard today in the halls here at digital world: all this online business, everyone has an opinion and I don't really care...

It's true: the democracy that the Internet brought to the world, where anyone with a keyboard can spout off to the maddening crowd (and this writer knows to include himself in that grouping) might be like giving a chimpanzee a loaded handgun.

I've never felt that everyone had a right to his or her own opinion. That just because a person had an opinion he or she had the right to say it. No, that's not right at all. Some--hell, many--opinions are based ignorance and/or prejudice. Whatever happened to the time when opinions were based on reasoning and research and well-thought-out arguments?

But now we have bloggers who love to just spew. Sites like blogspot.com and tumblr let people's fingers just fly. No journalistic ethnics about these people at all. As a matter of fact, a person who strongly identifies herself as a blogger actually said to me once, we're not journalists, we're bloggers. You're not a journalist. To which I quickly retorted, yes I am.

We're bloggers, as if that particular banner is something to be held high, the way the term, student, was used in the sixties, as though a student was some special being based on the fact that they were some sort of intellectual force.

The power that the Internet impresses on some people is a bit vulgar, truth be told.

What the Internet has done is magnified our society to colossal proportions. We can communicate to vast numbers of people, more than print ever allowed. It is enlarged the scope of our democracy. And just like our little democracy here in the United States, with it comes a level of responsibility, which the Internet has equally magnified.

So the level of responsibility the Internet imposes should be taken seriously by writers and readers alike, but it does fall on the readers to be the final judges as the consumers that they are. Just like buyers in a capitalistic free market, the readers are the pretty much the final judge because they are the ones consumer the content on the Web. I say pretty much because not everything is in their hands either. But most of the responsibility is in their hands to decide in the end what is good and what isn't.

Unfortunately, most people don't get it, but that's fodder for another blog.