Does Your Opinion Still Matter?

Back when our founding fathers had the dream of democracy and freedom for all, the one thing that was central in their thinking was the idea of giving everybody a voice. What history has shown us is that when people's opinions are suppressed it leads to great tension and eventually to revolutions. What communists try to do is to suppress opinion. They want to shut everybody up because the individual counts for nothing. It's all about the masses and the elite few who control them.

The greatness of our society and our democracy lies in our freedom to express ourselves. Often during revolutions artists flourish because they become the voice of a nation. During the Russian Revolution, art played an integral part in leading the revolution. While people were being "shut up" artists used images to have their say and to express what a generation of people are feeling.

More recently the events in Iran has sparked a renewed outrage at this primitive style of governing people. To have your opinion controlled and dictated by a bunch of politicians and religious leaders who feel threatened is hard to comprehend in this day and age. It seems like the most unlikely savior of this revolution will not be some charismatic leader, but rather the internet.

With the internet, the people of Iran found a way to get themselves heard; a way to express their opinions. It seems like it's need that we all have. We all want to be heard. We all want to feel like what we say matters.

The real question then is whether your voice really matters in our modern democratic society. At times it seems like that with all the opinions our there that we are being drowned in an overload of opinion. It's getting so bad that it's become hard to tell the difference between right and wrong, real and fake, actual and virtual.

Yes, the internet makes communicating on a global scale not only possible, but universal. Yes, it does give everybody a voice, but at what cost? Is it distorting truth? Has it become a monster that no one can control anymore?

Regardless of what it is or isn't, the internet has taken on this role of giving us all a place to say what we think. While China is trying to filter their internet content (how insane is that) the rest of the world is embracing this immense diversity and this new and wonderful twist on what free speech has become.