SYTSEER 

Opinions seem to be gathering momentum lately. Everywhere you look, the important views of someone or another are posted for perusal and comment. I don’t know if my time is well spent in perusing this vast wordscape of opinion, but I think that it probably is not. I’d rather spend my time exploring the vast landscape of places, where people are daily manifesting their ideas and busy working to solve the problems of their immediate needs. This is where the nets of discovery are being cast, and where the density of ideas is at it’s greatest. When people are busy solving problems , they don’t have as much time for opining.

The internet, like the television before it and radio and newspapers before that, has great potential to connect people and ideas, but unfortunately by our current practices seems mostly employed to entertain momentary inclinations. The small talk of interaction is taking precedence over the more involved discourse of problem solving, and that’s too bad. Not only because problem solving is in our interest as a community, but because the more involved exchanges required for that type of work inevitably yield a greater understanding of one another than the mere exchange of opinions ever can. I’m not disparaging this technology, or even our current infatuation with these most paltry of it's abilities, but I am proposing that we can undertake as individuals to make a better, more meaningful tool of it.  There are countless examples of this happening all around us, for social, political, logistical, artistic, engineering, agricultural, etc., exchanges.  It’s application goes on forever with potential to establish and maintain discourses as far ranging as the imagination will allow, and yet we find ourselves mired in a shallow, repetitive, sound bitten, small talking conversation peppered with opinions and largely devoid of ideas. It’s not very engaging and more and more often I find it to be off-putting.

It would be a shame if we were to relegate this latest version of communication technology to the scrap heap of short sighted commercial endeavor.

That’s just my opinion.