In Chapter 1, I argued that when we take a close look at what we mean by ‘opinion’, we find paradoxes. Opinions are valuable but denigrated, publicly available but protected, personal but shared, unitary but potentially self-contradictory, ephemeral but socially structural, and local but potentially global. These paradoxes arise if we fail to see that opinions are both situated and mediated. Opinions are situated in that they are actions in on-going talk, interactions with other people, enacted in particular settings of time and place. But if they are to have any effect, they must be mediated, disembedded, and packaged for use, standardized and reproduced in texts, and linked intertextually to other texts. It might seem that this was just a matter of reduction from the complexity of interaction to the simplicity of media summaries. But reports of opinions can be particularly effective in conveying conviction and sincerity when they retain traces of having been said by someone to someone in a particular situation.

In this chapter, I look back over the earlier analyses of focus groups, phone-ins, and vox pops, and explore what it means to say that opinions are talk. I will argue that it means that the expression of opinion is an action in words (not an inner state), an interaction (not just psychological), and that it is enacted at a particular time and place, not as a general statement.