Gossip
"Did you Hear?"(9/18/2006) looked at gossip as a form of aggression, barely scratching the surface of positive news shared between friends. In a column also called "Did you hear?" (5/11/2007), Gail Rosenblum of the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune looks at research into the truly neutral nature of gossip, neutral in content and in gender. A survey commissioned by BT Cellnet in 2001 and conducted by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC, see undated report by Kate Fox) concluded that men gossip as much as women, although they are more apt to deny it. However, the definition used for gossip by the SIRC study is "chatty talk between friends", which makes it unsurprising that the study founf gossip to be the most popular use of mobile phones. However a secondary definition provided more depth: "the process of informally communicating value-laden information about members of a social setting."
The findings of the SIRC study are contrary to Levin and Arluke's (1985) finding that men spend less time gossiping than women, although Rosenblum's article quotes Levin in a way that suggests he may have adjusted his view since writing his book, Gossip: The Inside Scoop, 20 years ago. Baumeister et al (2004) proposes that gossip is a critical method of observational teaching for socialization, which he suggests is why people will gossip about strangers.
I have been thinking about gossip a lot lately, since I have been making a greater effort to avoid it. Gossip is one of the things that has always turned me off of the idea of belonging to a community. I've actively avoided, in the past, having my friends know each other because the "did you hear about..." talk made me so uncomfortable. However, I've been thinking about it a lot in terms of the poly community lately, and it's felt like a really necessary safeguard in situations where normative behavioral "rules" are discarded. Without the gossip to warn me that so-and-so has a history of dragging people into her baggage, or that whats-his-face doesn't always use condoms, I think the already burdensome level of negotiations would become unworkable.
The findings of the SIRC study are contrary to Levin and Arluke's (1985) finding that men spend less time gossiping than women, although Rosenblum's article quotes Levin in a way that suggests he may have adjusted his view since writing his book, Gossip: The Inside Scoop, 20 years ago. Baumeister et al (2004) proposes that gossip is a critical method of observational teaching for socialization, which he suggests is why people will gossip about strangers.
I have been thinking about gossip a lot lately, since I have been making a greater effort to avoid it. Gossip is one of the things that has always turned me off of the idea of belonging to a community. I've actively avoided, in the past, having my friends know each other because the "did you hear about..." talk made me so uncomfortable. However, I've been thinking about it a lot in terms of the poly community lately, and it's felt like a really necessary safeguard in situations where normative behavioral "rules" are discarded. Without the gossip to warn me that so-and-so has a history of dragging people into her baggage, or that whats-his-face doesn't always use condoms, I think the already burdensome level of negotiations would become unworkable.