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Loud, Confident & Wrong
You don’t know anything.
My father frequently used a phrase to describe his performance style based on a review he once got: “Loud, Confident and Wrong”. He found it hilarious, but also largely agreed with it. It’s remained a self-effacing descriptor for the whole family whenever we perform due to its pithy cruelty and insight. But where we see it as a funny assessment of passionate musicians doing a thing they enjoy but maybe not being the best at it, the phrase seems to have come to encapsulate the entire contemporary moment…
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a much publicised theory based on research done by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, that posits that people with limited competence in certain areas often overestimate their abilities. People online tend to use this to describe politicians they don’t like, especially when it is some former PR executive who then leads a country, and given the state of the world today it is hard to argue with that. The fact that fans of the world’s richest man insist he is a genius when he has designed none of the none-rubbish cars he sells or rockets he owns, speaks to a misplaced faith in the abilities of the rich and powerful, but it is this belief that maintains their positions of power. It is not just the 1% who suffer from this misplaced certainty, however.
Anything posted on the internet has a ‘Right to Reply’ built in today. Everything anyone does can be commented on, reposted, saved and repurposed for the entertainment of the world online. Given the way social media companies run their websites, this sort of constant commentary is built into the way they operate and how they make money. We are encouraged to offer criticism and opinion on everything we see and do, and, if enough people share that sentiment, that criticism can alter the thing we’re looking at. Some people call this a consumer empowerment, some call it cancel culture, while others just call it ‘shit posting’. The point is, social media has made a bold attempt to “democratise opinion”.
Commentary was once the bastion of only those with a platform. Newspapers, television and film studios, celebrities, artists and so on were the only ones whose opinions could be heard by the general public for the longest time. The internet has changed that. The problem is, the validity of all of these…
