Blog 3: Sharing and Gossip


Over the past few years of studying communications the idea of humans having an unquenchable need for gossip has come up many times. This need for gossip can be traced back to communal primate grooming (as seen in class) or seen today in popular TV programs like TMZ that relay specifically on following and talking about other people’s lives. In the simplest form I believe that our attachment to gossip is rooted in our social nature to know everything that is happening in our environment. In the same way one could argue that we are wired to be social creatures and want to understand our surrounding, they could also argue that sharing is a large part of being social. For example, in our earliest definition of communications we determined that it takes two to communicate, there needs to be a sender and receiver.
The question that I wish to pose is, have modern advances in social media raised this want for knowing and gossip? Rather than giving a simple yes or no answer I believe this can be broken down by quality and quantity. Using the idea of Dunbar’s number and the overall intensification of social media one could be confident in saying that the quantity of gossip (number of people you follow) has greatly increased. Following Dunbar’s theory, the human brain can only process so many quality friendships, yet this magic number is exceeded by users on majority of platforms. That being said, there are also lots of outside influences that lead people to becoming ‘friends’ on social media. When discussing the quality of modern gossip things become more difficult. People refer to our current time as the information age or computer age, both rather self-explanatory terms that refer to our increased access to information. With this increased access to information people have the ability to stay up to date with anyone that is sharing, there is no more wondering, everything is available. However, to offer a different perspective one could also consider the fact that people choose what they share and can therefore create non-representative realities.

Comments

  1. Lauren WilkinsonOctober 19, 2018 at 9:20 AM

    Gossip and social media is very interesting! I feel as though I am very connected through social media to all of the celebrities and therefore this is intrinsically tied to the gossip I am personally interested in. Modern advances have made it significantly easier to connect and gossip and for it to spread at a speed once unheard of. For example, I follow all of the Kardashian/Jenner's on Instagram, because there lives, products and opinions are interesting to me albeit not very educational. The gossip that speculated Kylie Jenner's pregnancy was easy to follow, especially because in our connected world, there were links everywhere! A comment on a Jenner pic would lead to me an account with speculations, which would lead to another account, etc. In this sense the quantity of gossip that is reached via social media has increased, where before if I wanted to know all of this I would have had to go to a store to pick out the best magazine and skim to find the information I wanted to potentially come up unsuccessful. While the quality of the gossip still may lack, regardless of the amount of people I follow, it is still easier to find and the abundance is overwhelming.

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  2. UnknownOctober 21, 2018 at 4:01 PM

    This is a very interesting topic as sharing and gossip have been polarizing aspects of our everyday life even before our regular use of social media. It is clear to see that the use of social media has allowed the sharing of gossip to be fast-tracked with the ability to reach a large amount of social media users in a small window of time, and as social media users, whether we like it or not, our reproducing of this content plays a vital part in the relaying of this gossip.

    So to answer your question, i would definitely say that social media has raised our want this want for knowing and gossip due to the extreme accessibility of this gossip. All it takes is the opening of an app or website and all this gossip and information is right in front of our eyes with the potential to be reproduced on our behalf.

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  3. Tarik Lee-VaiyaOctober 21, 2018 at 6:50 PM

    This post is very interesting. I like your reference to TMZ as a source for people to socially relate to. Celebrities have become ways for different people to connect and become friends on social media because they both shown an interest and can gossip together. This also relates to the social shaping of technology because we choose and declare how we want initiate gossip with others, not technology.

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