On Gossip

Art by Chassidy Stephenson

In my youth, I was staunchly against gossip. I thought of gossip as a sort of infinite lie vortex. Because nothing that anyone said in passing would ever be fact-checked, the annals of the gossip economy would always be rife with the sorts of lies that could ruin someone’s reputation in an instant if they were believed. 

As I got older, I started to soften my stance as I realized that there was more to gossip than the infinite lie vortex. As much as gossip could be that at times, it could also be the grounds for a truth buried deep below the surface, that sacred space Power’s censorious thumbs could not quite reach. Sometimes, information exists in the gossip underground because it cannot safely travel in the light. Celebrity gossip forums and leak sites fall under this category, functioning as a hub for less-than-flattering information about those whose social capital makes the dissemination of that information risky.

The tantalizing nature of gossip, that it may contain hard-won truth, can lend it a certain cachet. Facts are boring unless they’re facts that someone doesn’t want you to know. This cachet is not the same as an epistemological system, and I think that those who participate in the gossip underground understand this. Gossip can instantly lose its value if it is proven to be false. The issue is that what often determines the value of information is not its truthfulness but its intimacy, and the bypassed intentions to have it kept secret. This can create problems if, for example, a piece of false information spreads far beyond its later correction, causing the misinformation to persist regardless of being proven untrue. 

The current state of the information economy further complicates things. It is easier than ever to fake proof of an assertion and to spread misinformation. What is perhaps even more alarming is that the gossip underground is no longer underground. The rules of gossip—the lack of coherent epistemological standards combined with cachet being the determining factor for range—have infiltrated the political and rhetorical spheres. Gossip no longer just carries truth in spite of Power, it is also the medium through which Power decides what is true. The official White House policy to “flood the zone” with misinformation which cannot possibly be corrected at the rate that it is produced is a deliberate strategy to uselogics of gossip to our administration’s advantage. The current White House lies so egregiously not because they think they can pass it off as the truth, but because doing so is, in and of itself, an exercise in power. It says this: what good is your fact checking if you have no social capital to back it up?

The problem, I think, is not with gossip itself, but where its rules are applied. The accelerated spread of information can serve as a vehicle for truth that would otherwise be brushed aside. However, the logics of gossip can also serve to forego truth altogether. 

Orion Smith Anderson

Art by Chassidy Stephenson