Gossip

[differenceblog]

"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

Comments

[beowabbit]

Gossip is one of the things that has always turned me off of the idea of belonging to a community.
Interesting, since I think gossip is what creates a community - I don’t think you can have community without gossip.

Of course, my definition of gossip is a bit broad; it’s not just ‘what’s-his-face tried to pressure me into not using condoms’ or ‘so-and-so really swooped in and took care of everything when my dad was in the hospital’, but also ‘hey, did you hear so-and-so and thus-and-such are getting handfasted?’ and ‘squee! whatsizname got a fellowship to Julliard!’ and ‘is it true that so-and-so is moving back to town?’ It’s all the little things that let us feel like we have a bit more connection with these people’s lives than with the lives of random people we don’t know.

There’s malicious gossip, and then there’s the cement of human relationships. But I think they’re the same tool, just used by different people with different goals and standards.

(I guess you could paraphrase this as ‘gossip doesn’t hurt feelings, people hurt feelings’. :-)