Everybody Does It

If we make a list of more or less universal human activities, and lop off the obviously primal – eating, sleeping, raising children – a prominent member of the items left is gossip. It’s one of the most common things we use language for. Pretty clearly it plays some important role in our cultural economy. Can we say what that is, exactly?

At one level I suppose we could say that sharing gossip is our version of the grooming behavior engaged in by some of our relative species – a bonding and alliance building activity. I don’t that’s the real point though. I think that the information shared is more fundamental. All gossip is political, in the sense that it is ultimately about power relationships in the society. Most of the content is about who is doing what to/with whom, and hence about how this affects power relationships. If gossip is about politics, in this sense, it also *is* politics, since the communication of information (or misinformation) is not disinterested but can serve political ends, and can build or destroy alliances.

We use speech for a lot of purposes that don’t fit the category of gossip, but it’s amusing to speculate that gossip might have been a significant factor in the development of speech. The most basic purpose of speech seems to me to be orchestration of cooperation, to communicate a warning for example, to signal location, or enforce power relationships. Non-human primates use vocal signals to do all those things. Social insects engage in rather elaborate cooperative activities coordinated by chemical and visual signals, so it’s not terribly hard to imagine humans evolving a simple vocal call meaning “danger, lion” into “I’ll go this way, you go that, and we will cut him off at the pass.” How, though, do we get to the description of interpersonal interactions and motivations?

Men like to think that we gossip less than women, but one of the things that we need wives and girlfriends for is keeping us up to date on the current gossip.

One reason Facebook became such a spectacular success, I suspect, is that it turbocharges our fascination with gossip.