The Denning Kuegler effect
Medium’s answer to the Dunning Kruger effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fifty five years of living, it is that there are very few entitlements in life. Over those years, I can tell you that I have experienced my requisite share of failure. I have had many a gallant plan end in a proverbial faceplant. In my younger years, I took these failures as though they were the end of the world. I have since tempered my responses and expectations.
Still, I entertain notions of, if not exceptionality, at least stubbornness in the pursuit of what I hope will be a transformative experience or personal evolution. I don’t think I am unique in this regard, nor in any way entitled to fulfillment. We are offered the pursuit of happiness, not its realization.
It is with this sense of humble aspiration that I pursue my writing evolution. In my Medium journey, I’ve told myself, if this platform is about writing, I will succeed in it. I am not an across-the-board uber-confident person. But I do know that I can write. As with any other writer on this board, I come here with the perceptions and values of my age bracket and generation.
When I got notice of being mentioned in a story about a writer I follow, I clicked to learn that the writer received a bonus. This writer’s posts are mostly about his progress on Medium. There’s nothing there that hasn’t been written about before and certainly nothing new in the way it is written. He admits his bonus resulted largely from following, highlighting and commenting on the work of others, not his writing.
I’ve written before about differences in writing and blogging between generations. Among these, is that older writers still have a sense of decorum about writing. That is, they only post when they have something to say that is meaningful — at least to them. The fifty plus crowd doesn’t hold a ticker tape parade every time they acquire a new follower. Some advice we receive on this platform runs contrary to what a mature writer believes is good practice.
Write Every Day
What does writing every day mean to an older writer? It means writing your novel or screenplay in a creative flow state and holding it until you finish lest the forces of distraction and outside relationships break your mojo.
It does not mean filling the internet with glib ersatz piffle. No self respecting writer would fill space by “writing everyday” to add to the word pollution we see strewn all over the platform. We respect ourselves and the power of words more than that.
Conformity Creep
One of my biggest disappointments about Medium is its prevailing climate of conformism. There is very little in the way of true dissent. I find this very surprising for such an open platform. Forbidden topics like populist politics, conspiracy theories or vaccine hesitation are almost never discussed for fear of cancel culture mobbing. This dearth of contrarianism gives the place a very narrow main stream media feel.
Social Media Problems
It has been more or less proven if only by polling that social media makes people unhappy, if not actually exacerbating underlying mental illness. We are served a daily tsunami of humblebrag articles about achieving certain incomes apparently all through social media style following, clapping and highlighting. The sheer plethora of this detritus is starting to look and feel like so much pollution. Like Facebook, the message is “I’m having good life and you’re not”.
Celebrity Fawning
So Chrissy Teigen has apologized for all that online bullying. Poor Meghan Markle, her suffering amidst all those rich, fuddy-duddy white people is so poignant. Why she’s as big a civil rights hero as Rosa Parks. Britney Spears’ conservator controversy just proves her victimhood at the hands of her malevolent father. Pity the poor showbiz kid! This platform is a junior varsity version of the old teen mag Tiger Beat.
Medium Brown Nosing
Your six month anniversary on the platform is not that interesting nor is your cheerleading for the platform’s every update and press release. In fact, if anything, it shows that you have nothing to write about and think that elementary school style suck holing will somehow endear you to the algorithmic gods. It’s as tired as your transparent fan worship of Ev Williams.
Shortform
The introduction of Shortform writing further cheapens the craft. Let’s keep debauching writing further by monetizing the equivalent of sending a text! After all, those pesky paragraph rules really cramp my style when I want to add my two cents about a new social media platform monetizing emoji usage.
These observations have led me to form the following theory named after the Dunning Kruger effect. I posit that Medium writers are afflicted by the (Tim) Denning —(Tom) Kuegler effect. So named after two of the platform’s most prominent bloggers.
The Denning-Kuegler effect: As blogging democratizes writing, it increases its supply but lowers it’s quality. As we see the lowered quality, we believe that our individual success as writers is also democratized and feel that our rights have been transgressed when it doesn’t materialize.
Now please excuse me. After wallowing in this literary pigsty I need to go take a shower. Have a nice day!