Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Opinionators everywhere.
Have you seen Sidewiki yet? Released in September as part of the Google Toolbar – when I booted up Firefox sometime last week I was invited to add Sidewiki to my toolbar features so that I too could be an instant commenter on anyone’s website or blog, without having to go through any approval channels to do so. Unlike a regular commenting function on a website, Google’s sidewiki is not a part of the site itself and so is free from moderation or even the strictures of fact-checking, leaving any user free to say anything about a given website. Only Google has the power to remove posts if they contravene their basic guidelines which include not promoting child pornography or using profanity – and very likely this will only happen if a site owner notices the comments and makes an official complaint. If you don’t use Google toolbar and aren’t aware of sidewiki, comments could go alongside your site for others to read and you would be none the wiser.
A tad annoying to those of us web developers who already have so much else to monitor about our sites on the Internet, but perfectly in keeping with the opinionating culture of the Internet which is informing the rest of our society these days. So much of what is populating Sidewiki already is short on facts and long on “what I think” including religious rants, site-sniping and lots of downright incorrect information being posted alongside legitimate sites – giving these opinions the weight of site contributions instead of relegating them to the moderated comments sections where they belong. But isn’t that what opinion polling and voxpop interviews have always been about?
Has there ever been a culture to eager to profess on topics it knows nothing about than the current North American standard? From the Obama-hater’s going on record about their fears of his “czars and how much land they are getting from US citizens” not to mention Palin’s opinions on non-existent “death panels” right down to the neighbourhood debate raging among my stepdaughter’s friends and their mothers about what high school to select. It all seems to be short on facts (and logic) and big on emotional rhetoric, each person supporting the other’s emotional state until they are all whipped into a bit of a frenzy really. Is that what decision-making these days is largely based on? Opinions based on nothing but gut reaction?
Now I’m not saying that emotional responses and gut feelings don’t need to be checked out as part of the decision-making process, or when forming an opinion about a person or a policy or a school…. But I also believe that fact needs to come into it somewhere. Because life isn’t just all about what you or I “think”, and there is some objective reality that we’re faced with no matter what perspective we come from (yeah yeah – you postmodernists can argue that’s it’s all subjective but there’s nothing subjective about getting hit by a bus so whatever).
Opinions totally have their place – of course – like on personal blogs, comments on websites, in general conversation about this or that product (“oh i really like it, because”) – but I am increasingly annoyed by what seems to be the elevation of opinion to be the trump card of debate online and offline. Things like sidewiki are just a symptom of a self-obsessed culture and as a general user I’m not sure why I would really care what some random stranger feels about this website or that. It really, I suppose, just makes another room where everyone is talking and no one is really listening. Which I suppose is what our culture is all about in big and small ways. What an unpleasant thought that is.
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Red Cedar 
In conversation with a freshly minted geezer, I was told that at one company in the 60s, the best salesman for residential installs was, well, I don’t know if there is a way to say this that won’t offend someone, queer. Not quite like you or I. In retrospect, it would be easy for us to comment that he was probably homosexual (wicked at interior decor sales – too easy!) but then, it just wasn’t done. Your direct personal opinion wasn’t usually asked for, or given. The facts was: this guy closes the big deals. If anybody cared about anything else, they never mentioned it. Now, he said (the geezer, not the salesman), it seems mandatory to have an opinion on things no matter if it’s relevant or not.