Online Life: Gossip
Does anyone else watch the evolution of agreed on invisible rules--custom--on the internet? Human behavior adapting to the rapid proliferation of tech, in this case, the increasing ability through powerful search engines to find, if one wants, just where people might be talking about you or something you do? (I guess I'll find out if this post just sits here having been skipped over.)
I don't have any conclusions--I always feel a couple steps behind--but my hugely increased reading list made me grab my copy of Gossip by Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Here's her opening:
Think of gossip as a version of pastoral . . . It may manifest malice, it may promulgate fiction in the guise of fact, but its participants do not value it for such reasons; they cherish, rather, the opportunity it afforeds for "emotional speculation." Temporarily isolated from the larger social world, having created for themselves a psychic space like that of Arden or Thessaly, they weave their web of story. Their "art," like other oral forms, endures only briefly; it's transience heightens its value.
Internet exchanges aren't oral, but they can be as transient as the gossip exchanged in the coffee houses or salons of the 1700s--words appear almost with the speed of speech, and can vanish as quickly.
Like the fictions of Spenser's shepherds or Virgil's, such gossip may comment both obliquely (by its implicit assertion of opposed values) and directly on society's corruptions.
Or think of it as drama. Two characters more cheerful than Beckett's, but testifying their closeness like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, speaking the language of shared experience, revealing themselves as they talk of others, constructing a joint narrative--a narrative that conjures up yet other actors, offstage, playing out their own private dramas.
Or as fiction: fragments of lives transformed into story
I don't have any conclusions--I always feel a couple steps behind--but my hugely increased reading list made me grab my copy of Gossip by Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Here's her opening:
Think of gossip as a version of pastoral . . . It may manifest malice, it may promulgate fiction in the guise of fact, but its participants do not value it for such reasons; they cherish, rather, the opportunity it afforeds for "emotional speculation." Temporarily isolated from the larger social world, having created for themselves a psychic space like that of Arden or Thessaly, they weave their web of story. Their "art," like other oral forms, endures only briefly; it's transience heightens its value.
Internet exchanges aren't oral, but they can be as transient as the gossip exchanged in the coffee houses or salons of the 1700s--words appear almost with the speed of speech, and can vanish as quickly.
Like the fictions of Spenser's shepherds or Virgil's, such gossip may comment both obliquely (by its implicit assertion of opposed values) and directly on society's corruptions.
Or think of it as drama. Two characters more cheerful than Beckett's, but testifying their closeness like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, speaking the language of shared experience, revealing themselves as they talk of others, constructing a joint narrative--a narrative that conjures up yet other actors, offstage, playing out their own private dramas.
Or as fiction: fragments of lives transformed into story