#80 We love teaching the experts

November 7, 2022

Last weekend, I witnessed something fascinating. I saw everyone on Twitter teaching Elon Musk how to run Twitter. They never cared about the fact that Elon Musk has revolutionized two industries in the last decade: the automotive industry and space travel, and has more experience running a company than 99.9% of the people on Twitter. But, the folks of Twitter never stopped. The advice kept coming.

We love being the experts on social media. Whenever a major news event occurs, the entire social media crowd turns into an advice machine. When a cricket or football match is aired on television, we mock the players and their performance. When a music album comes out, we’re more interested in finding out which song it sounds like instead of actually enjoying the music. When a movie comes out, we become analysts and we beat the movie to a pulp (I’ve done that too).

In the past, we had a small group of experts and nerds (who’ve immersed themselves in the field), who gave their opinions on certain topics. The rest of us were readers. We loved reading their opinions and discussions. It was a time when the internet was the place for knowledge.

The moment the Internet became a platform for attention, things started going South. It quickly started filling up with superficial analysis, memes, offensive tweets and cyberbullying. It created a vast amount of noise and it faded the line between real and fake opinions. We try to portray ourselves as experts in all fields, which is impossible. The better way is to get familiar with one domain, be obsessed with it, and eventually become an expert.

I know it is easy to say, but hard to follow. I’ve been a prick on social media in the past. It’s become a habit we got used to and it can’t be changed overnight. But, we can be more conscious whenever we’re trying to share a controversial opinion. Instead of thinking how many retweets it will get me, we should think about what we’re backing it up with.