Leave it to my dear friend Terry to provide a germ for rumination: "I have reflected more than once on the unnecessary use of the modifier 'personal' as in 'personal opinion.' Aren't all opinions personal? Same for personal experience; do we have impersonal experiences?"
I love the idea of impersonal experience. It's potentially so au courant, what with "virtual" reality, internet social networking, avatar gaming, and such.
If the experience is impersonal, are we really responsible for its consequences? Impersonal experience could operate on many levels, from burying your head in a PDA rather than engaging with the people around you -- to texting while driving -- to oblivion to the incontrovertible reality of climate change while cruising the highway in an SUV to the mall or in a half ton pick-up to the office. Wall Street's into the con and Main Street's in over its neck in credit. Living at such extremes of distraction and disengagement we cease to participate in the common weal as responsible citizens.
In 1985 Neil Postman bemoaned the decline of critical thinking in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Television, arguing that goal-oriented thinking through creative ideas is destroyed by the commodification of news, politics and religion, as mediated through television. Hence the demise of rational argument.
Americans have pretty much universally come to be identified as consumers, not citizens, hardly even as people. (The colleges where I work just changed the title of a Biology course from "Nutrition for Today" to "Consumer Nutrition.")
Four years after Postman, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis published The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives. Their prognosis was even bleaker than Postman's.
By contrast with the technological/entertainment barrage of today, someone way back in the '80s should have warned these guys, "You ain't seen NOTHIN' yet!" The fear-mongering of Glenn Beck and his ilk is designed to appeal to the Tea Party mentality: The medium effectively provides an illusion of "personal" opinion when Tea Partiers are really just regurgitating the bile they've been riled up with through "impersonal" pixilated experiences.
The irony is that a great deal of the appeal of the Tea Party phenomenon lies in people's desire to engage with each other one on one as real flesh and blood individuals. This desire is among the fundamental appeals of religious community -- and also of initiation into the gang, the bowling league, the sorority, the neighborhood bar, the twelve-step program, the Nazi Youth (see Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will). Though technological innovation moves us into a more and more impersonal world of isolation, still our quest for genuine human interaction manifests itself for good and for ill.
