I Have a Question

Do you think people make up their own minds less often than they used to?

This is kind of an overly general question, the type I'm not usually too fond of, but I do wonder about some stuff...

When I was in college and liked writing music reviews a whole lot more than I do now, I had trouble shaking a bad habit of checking out other reviews of the same album to see where my opinion landed in the vast nothingness of music reviews. If I didn't like an album, I needed to double-check that other folks didn't like it either to make sure I wasn't an idiot, and this was way too easy to do. YouTube didn't even exist, and there weren't nearly as many blogs n stuff, but there was already an overload of opinions out there to Google. I could not stop doing this, but I can understand being younger, insecure, and not very confident about my musical taste/opinions. There were even a couple times I softened a review based, at least a little, on the fact that a bunch of 'professional' people had liked something I didn't. That's pretty hard to understand now.

So does the overabundance of Opinions out there mostly serve to feed our insecurities?

Are people actually more Opinionated now than ever before, or does it just feel that way because I spend a shitload of time on the internet, where Opinion is king?

Sometimes I get the feeling there are folks who get outraged by stuff only because a lot of other people got outraged by it; maybe this is no different than Time Before Internet, but it sure as hell seems to happen a whole lot faster and in larger quantities. Then it goes away and things move on more or less the same, but LO, we have ENTERTAINED ourselves. And probably somebody made a buck or two off it.

I have a question.