The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
That’s really interesting! In the UK we have an excellent tradition of making both really excellent and really abhorrent documentaries, so clearly they’re not all made equal.
Appreciate hearing an expert opinion on what this means in reality.
The quality has very little to do with it honestly! It’s that if somebody’s making a documentary about something, they clearly care about the subject. In addition, you have to to decide who gets interviewed and who doesn’t. Who gets to tell the story and who doesn’t. Then you have to edit: what stays? What gets cut? How can that ever be objective? You have to choose where the camera is pointed, what lens, what camera. It’s nothing but decisions all the time, all of which reflect your own personal biases and values. And there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s about knowing the limitations of our own perspectives.
I definitely agree. The UK has a wonderful tradition of documentary filmmaking.