Gossip: It’s Everywhere!
Originally published at The Preternatural Post. Please leave any comments there.
Role players are not strangers to the drama created by gossip on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and even our instant messages and chats. Lest we think that makes us unique here’s an intriguing statistic: nearly 15 percent of Work email is gossip according to a recent study from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Perhaps even more surprisingly, researchers say gossip happens at all levels of an organization, not just at the lower levels typically “blames” for it.
I was a little surprised that it turned out to be almost 15 percent,” said Eric Gilbert an assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing who examined hundreds of thousands of emails from the former Enron corporation. “But then again, gossip is something we all do in every aspect of our lives. I imagine corporate executives will probably take note of this - and then send an email to Jennifer down the hall saying that Bob in purchasing gossips all the time.”
So what, exactly, constitutes gossip, inside or outside the work place? The simplest definition is that gossip is a conversation, whether face to face, over the phone or via some electronic means like email, instant messaging or even twitter, that contains information about a person or persons not party to the conversation. Based on that definition, Twitter is less of a gossip haven than you might expect because everyone is party to every conversation as long as they are following the persons engaged in the conversation. That may sound like a good thing. Gossip, however, is an important form of communication.
“There is a rich literature in anthropology and sociology on the universality and utility of gossip among human social groups,” Tanushree Mitra, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech College of Computing who assisted with the research. “A recent survey of that literature summarized gossip as having four main purposes: information, entertainment, intimacy and influence.”
In addition to purpose, gossip can also be classified as positive, negative or neutral based on the emotional context and language used in the conversation. A significant potion of gossip messages are in fact sentiment neutral. Of the messages and conversations which are not neutral, negative gossip occurs almost three (2.7) times more often than positive gossip. Evidently humans as still struggling with the concept that of saying nothing if they can’t say something nice.
The researchers also discovered that gossip takes place at nearly every level within an organization, although it is heaviest among the rank-and-file workers. The second heaviest gossipers, at least at Enron, were the vice-presidents and directors. Further the heaviest up flow of gossip was from vice presidents and directors up to CEO and presidents. Further, vice presidents and directors also gossiped them most down the chain with gossip originating among VPs and directors ending up, eventually, at the lowest levels of the organization.
Click to viewThe next time you feel the urge to say, or type, something about someone else, realise you aren’t alone. Gossip is everywhere. That doesn’t give you carte blanche to do it. Instead, that knowledge and the knowledge that gossip is more likely to be negative and hurtful implies we need to take a closer look and more responsibility about what we are communicating about others because, eventually, each of us is going to end up being the one talked about.
Related Posts