Yes, I’m recovering from another late night tweeting argument. It’s not easy reading like this, which reminds me of Ginger Roger’s famous line about dancing with Fred Astaire: in heals and backward. In Twitter’s case, it’s reading backward through fragments, trying to sort through the back and forth blurbs in reverse chronology.

When I teach a composition and rhetoric class, exploring the difference between forming an idea and having an opinion is pretty important stuff. They’re not the same; they’re not synonyms. An idea is a concept held in the mind as a result of mental understanding, activity, or awareness. Central to an idea is the human activity of making sense, comprehending the meaning of the idea, remaining open to the likelihood that an idea can change. An opinion, is a view or judgement about something based not necessarily on knowledge or experience, often subjective. Opinions are seldom, if ever, central to the purpose of finding or making meaning of something or anything. They are many and shared often, solicited and unsolicited.

Opinions may certainly be ideas but ideas must be more than merely opinions.

Opinions being what they are, usually highly subjective, are most often exchanged with little outcome aside from efforts to be right, assertions of superiority, or claims of self-evident truths: It is because I said it is! The opinions of one can have little to do to affect the opinion of an other. If the opinion-holder believes him or herself to be the only right “answer” or position, then the purpose of the exchange is to hold that position, to re-assert its self-evidence, to claim other opinions are wrong or inferior.

An idea is product of mental activity: experience and/or knowledge. It is less subjective, seldom rooted in judgment, and open to substation and refutation. We make and share ideas when we are interested in making meaning, comprehending something. When our opinions shift or change, they do so because we’ve moved our views toward ideas or have had ideas affect our previous opinion. Even in agreement, the paths of experience and knowledge leading to agreement often differ. Exploring those paths are worthwhile as well.

Social networks are hives for opinions, where people express and fulfill  needs to express views, some deeply rooted and highly personal. Most are not ready to be ideas or to encounter the ideas of others, let alone other opinions on the same subject. Here and there, ideas are introduced to the mix, along with requests for examples, substantiation or explication of those ideas: why do you think that? How do you come to hold this position? What leads you to this conclusion? These attempts to pull back the curtains of opinions to see if it’s possible to construct or understand an underlying idea.

This doesn’t always go well, as you can image. These aren’t mediums for patient explication (unfolding the meaning) of ideas for the purposes of new or deeper understanding. They haven’t had to be. Maybe they’re not the mediums for understanding.

Opinions  are wrapped up with emotions and habits: dig in my heals, hold  my ground, claim my rightness, claim the others’ wrongness. Things get heated, participants start claiming rights to express this or that opinion, or begin to take claim for the communication act: this is a debate, or this isn’t a debate.  Mostly, what’s transpiring online are the posting of 140 character or status editorials.

As more of global society transitions to networked electronic communication, byte-sized exchanges of text and image, further development of logo-centric privilege, increase frequency of change requiring adaptation, and the shrinking of discourse platforms,what space is there for ideas and their explication, refutation,or  substantiation?  Ideas take time to unravel and examine. They take time and a myriad of diverse influences to grow. They need space that cultivates silence as much as chatter. They live in rich, complex cultural contexts–which are difficult to preserve digitally, where too often everyone’s got an opinion.

Perhaps our new media cultivate new habits and the practice of meaning-making that moves much faster, less recursive, more immediate, less reflective? Maybe we’ll habitualize this collecting of editorials and opinions, in a space where everyone is always right and everyone else is always wrong. Are we suppose to get used to that? We may be changing, and the changes inevitable. We may be adapting to a new intellectual paradigm, but at what cost and to whom, for what gain or value? In the end, as they say, opinions are a dime a dozen.