Once upon a time there was a severe shortage of opinion. People would go about complaining of and lamenting - and even sometimes bemoaning - this state of affairs. They would wail and cry. To passers-by who passed by with taciturn mien they would call out, 'Give me an opinion; I need to hear an opinion'. Of course there were, even then, the regular sources of opinion known as newspapers, and there were the other well-known media. But these did not suffice for popular needs. 'Not that again,' people would say, having read an opinion of Sir Guthrie Threadneedle's for the 42nd time that year, or having heard Molly October saying on the radio that those with bare knees ought to cover them with sacking. The general public felt starved. They wanted more variety in the viewpoints they encountered. They wanted more and different voices. They wanted more and more.
And then, one day, someone invented The Sphere. The Sphere was a natty device (so named because of its spherical shape) into which anyone could speak, and have their opinions bruited far and wide. Just like that you could tell anyone who cared to listen that apples were the most boring fruit or that the colour of Tuesdays was orange. Suddenly there were opinions everywhere - and people who previously couldn't get enough of them now couldn't get enough of them. My, did they listen, did they drink it all in. As well as Sir Guthrie Threadneedle and Molly October, the listeners had the choice of all the sphericals, as those talking into The Sphere soon came to be known. And, hearing these sphericals, more and more people were prompted to avail themselves, themselves, of The Sphere and become sphericals in their turn.
What happened next was that there was a glut of opinion. There was so much opinion that people didn't know where to turn first - or second or third. There was so much opinion, it was like the air all around. It came to be hard to know what was opinion and what was just people chatting to one another. In fact, soon no one took opinion to be what it had previously been - the words of the wise and the worried or of the woolly and the wooden. They thought instead: It's jolly quiet around here - hasn't anyone got anything new to say? This marked the end of the First Great Opinion Bicycle.
A severe shortage of opinion there was twice upon a time...
