The other would be the difference between how ‘enfranchised’ people are, or believe themselves to be. Not so much having to do with intelligence (that is, that people today are ’smarter’ than those from a century ago), but that they not only feel the need to express opinions on just about everything…that they believe they have qualified opinions and should broadcast them. The premise of this column is proof.

The fact is that the generations who have been enabled by the Internet and its concomitant electronics are a short attention-spanned, self-absorbed, never-satisfied lot. The great teeming masses, the materialistic, acquisitional consumers who not only have to have more, more, more, but also have to say more, more, more. Why? Because they’re bored, because they’re unfulfilled, because their own keening provides them succor.

I read a ton of message boards and am constantly amazed by how ignorant, how ill-informed, how truly blunt-headed the average commenter is. And at the heart of all this is precisely what John has posited, the very notion of mouthing off about something they have absolutely no qualification to mouth off about.

Meh.

“Better to sit silent in corner and have people suspect you’re an idiot than to open mouth and remove all doubt.”

Perhaps more than anything else, the visitor from the early 20th century would be heartbroken by the decided lack of grace apparent around them. We live in a far less good-mannered time than they did. And our actions travel much farther now. How sad. How very, very sad.

I can see your point and I do agree with you, what bothers me is the people who are so definitive about their predisposed opinion, and feel they are so right and there is no way the movie can be good. It’s people like that who will see a film they have preached to the world will suck, they will like it, but never admit it to anyone because then they look stupid because they were so absolute in their opinion that changing it makes them look flawed. The pig headed know it alls are the ones who bug me. People like you are wise enough to admit to liking something they thought would be crap. It’s the ones who think their opinion is the only right one that piss me off.